Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26184563-20130421015649/@comment-995426-20170204123817

Oh, this is in relation to a debate from months ago. Re: whether Leatherhead (or any anthropomorphic mutant) can be considered part-human. His Mirage version identified himself as having both reptilian and human sides. And this may have been no accident&mdash;unlike Splinter and the turtles who were accidental mutants, Leatherhead was mutated intentionally by the Utroms in laboratory conditions, and he was raised by Dr. Xeinos as part of Utrom culture. They were aware specifically that Leatherhead's mutation included a human element. This would not have been far-fetched, as the Utroms at TCRI frequently worked with humans (albeit in disguise), and employed some humans (like Baxter Stockman) as subcontractors. It may also be, at least in the Mirage continuity, that Splinter and the turtles can also be considered part human, since their accidental mutation appears to have been under similar circumstances as Leatherhead. I say this because they are all sentient mutants of humanoid proportions. Though Mirage TMNT mutants were never numerous (Peter Laird kept it this way on purpose), not every mutant was humanoid&mdash;Terrorpin was basically a gigantic snapping turtle with no particular sentience. There are also the reptiles from volume 4 that lived on the isolated tepui in Venezuela and mutated when an Utrom ship crashed and spilled its mutagenic fuel, but those mutants, though roughly sentient and capable of speech, were not necessarily human-like.