User blog:Gilgameshkun/Mutagen Maintenance review

Mutagen Maintenance was published in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Universe issue 18. It's only four pages long, but this story may be more powerful than a lot of people immediately realize.

The little details&mdash;the completely consistent view angle, the gradually changing light levels from the window, the people coming and going...and imagine that being most of everything you see, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, month after month. A character like Seymour already went through his own personal hell before finding the Mutanimals. But now that he can no longer even move, he's living in a new hell of 24/7 monotony, only made in any way bearable by the fact that his companions obviously love him and go out of their way to give him some company. It says a lot about each of them, and it especially says a lot about Lindsey that she's taken to regularly watching TV shows with Seymour. Every page is filled with a certain kind of hell, and yet in every page are reminders of a meaningful love. The hell tries to make one feel isolated, neglected, abandoned, defeated, worthless, helpless, hopeless, a whole laundry list of issues associated with this kind of long-term assisted care&mdash;imagine needing to scratch an itch, and there may be no one around for hours in a position to do it. Even daily visits by loved ones can never quite erase this hell, but it tugs at the heartstrings that that they were doing whatever they can, whenever they can, with their finite time and ability, to turn hell into something that doesn't feel like hell.

This once happened to someone I knew, and they were stuck like this for months before finally passing away. As a visitor, every one of my rare visits (sometimes months apart, I'm ashamed to say) filled me with the remarkable weight of this situation they were in. Hoping things would improve. Hoping. Hoping. ... More hoping. Hoping for even the slightest good news. Hanging on to every tiniest bit of good news to be heard. And I'm just talking about me feeling all those things. I can't even begin to imagine everything they were feeling.

I honestly don't think the story will leave this Mutagen Man to languish as a forgotten piece of furniture the way a certain other series did to. Why? Because that series only paid the briefest, laziest lip service to Timothy's plight when the plot didn't need him as a monster-of-the-week, and then eventually forgot about him altogether while still having the audacity to always portray him in the background in full 3D. But Seymour's friends demonstrate a steadfast refusal to accept any similar fate for him, and that alone both offers greater hope to Seymour's future and reflects all the better on the character of his friends.

This short, four-page comic is both beautiful and haunting, simultaneously actively inspiring and implicitly despairing. It's a story written with genuine heart and soul, accepting both the happy and the sad while shepherding forward, and that's precisely the kind of TMNT storytelling that moves me the most.