If By Feast or By Famine is the second story in Black, White & Green #2.
Appearing in If By Feast or By Famine[]
Major characters[]
Minor characters[]
Species[]
Locations[]
- New York City
- Antonio's Pizzeria
- Lair
Objects & vehicles[]
Synopsis[]
Open on a view of New York City. Michelangelo talks about the misconception that New York City is the city that never sleeps. He thinks that if that were true, his brothers wouldn’t get mad at him when he played his boom box at 2:00 a.m. In his opinion, it’s not the city that never sleeps, it just works in shifts, and his has just started.
Dressed in a trenchcoat and fedora, Michelangelo contemplates an empty pizza box on a table in the lair. It is 12:00 pm and someone ate his entire breakfast. Mikey looks over at the couch, where his three brothers are seated, and thinks that the culprit is in this room. As Mikey thinks about how his father always says that a nutritious breakfast is the most important meal of the day, Raphael scowls at him and asks if he’s wearing his clothes. Leonardo wants to know why he’s talking like someone kicked him in the throat. Donatello is engrossed in a newspaper crossword puzzle as he figures out a three-letter word for “dipteran”, thinking that it’s too easy.
Mikey runs a finger along the top of the box and examines the green ooze he’s scooped up. This makes him wonder if the pizza made a pit stop before reaching the lair. He then backs up in his storytelling to half-past 10 when he phoned Antonio’s Pizzeria to place his usual order. Antonio took the order himself; a pie with extra corn flakes and a scoop of sugar. However, when the pie arrived, there was no pie at all.
When Mikey called Antonio, he learned that the man had fired and packed the pizza himself. Antonio also assured Mikey that his top pizza delivery man had taken the pie and that there must have been some sort of freak accident. Mikey’s imagination makes a leap to the culprit being the three-letter word for a “dipteran” - Baxter Stockman-Fly.
Mikey confronts Stockman, who is injured and has an arm in a sling. When Mikey asked the scientist what business he had with his pizza, Stockman replied that his collision with the pizza delivery man was solely due to the guy going the wrong way. Leo lifts his hand to ask Mikey what any of that has to do with (showing that Mikey has been talking out loud).
Deciding that he’ll have to spell it out for his brothers, Mikey says that someone heard the order go in and that’s when they hatched their plan. They needed to cause a distraction that would stop the pizza courier and give them an opportunity. While they didn’t expect Stockman, they did take advantage of the accident. A green, three-fingered hand is shown reaching for the pizza box. Then Mikey says by the time he received his order, the pizza was already gone.
Raph asks if Mikey means that he thinks one of them took his pizza off the street. Leo asks Mikey how long he left his pizza alone in the living room. Mikey thinks and then guesses it couldn’t have been more than ten or fifteen minutes. Just then, Splinter abruptly enters the room and calls out to his sons. He tells that when one becomes a father, one enters a life of service to their children. Splinter is shown smelling the pizza and approaching the box. The top, smeared with the green liquid, now seems to read “To Splinter” rather than “Antonio’s Pizzeria”. Splinter continues that the only birthdays that come to matter are the children’s.
As he lifts the lid on the pizza box, Splinter tears up. He tells the Turtles that there are no words to describe the feeling he got from them remembering his birthday. The Turtles all stare at their father for a moment without speaking and then Mikey says “surprise”, while the other Turtles also add their birthday greetings.