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Some TMNT stuff really isn't for little kids. |
Maximillian "Max" Jones appears in the Mirage Comics, and is a young failing student in Arkham, Massachusetts. His best friend is the straight-A student Pervis Walker.
As Men of Shadow opens, Pervis expresses his disbelief that Max spent so much on a first printing of The Dark Knight Returns. Max reasons that he's been paying a little on it each month, and since his allowance will be cut off due to his dismal report card, it was a now-or-never situation. Pervis tries to reassure Max that maybe he'll attend summer school with him, but then admits he wouldn't really.
Suddenly, the boys are faced by neighborhood bully Barry and his goons, and Max's new prized comic is taken and ripped in half. They are only spared further torment due to a nearby police officer being nearby, as Barry doesn't want to chance getting caught.
Later, after being blasted away by a bomb, Clark Ashton Allard lands in a field in front of the boys. They help the (only slightly) injured Allard to his pod, where he requests they stop where one of his secret lairs resides. Pervis goes off to get help, while Allard asks Max to stick around and not touch anything. Of course, being a teen boy, he investigates the pod while Allard is healing in his "auto-doc". He finds the caged spy eyes and reads a journal log on Allard's computer.
Before too long, though, the vampire leader Master Traquer has found them, and he captures Allard and Max. Pervis happens to run into the Turtles, Splinter, and Casey with the Turtlebot and he helps them find where Max and Allard are being held in Innsmouth.
The seven of them reach Innsmouth Seafood, where the vampire cult is holding them captive. Allard manages to finally rip himself free of the ropes, and Pervis saves Max. The Turtles, Casey, and Splinter battle the vampires, but the cultists manage to summon their monstrous god Dagon. During the fight, Casey smashes his baseball bat with a hit to Traquer, but an enraged Traquer grabs a hold of him. Max grabs part of the broken bat and stabs the vampire, saving Casey and ending Traquer's undead life. Allard is grabbed by Dagon, but he throws the summoning mechanism into its mouth to send it back from whence it came, internally.
The next morning, Max and Pervis head back to Arkham and realize they're going to get in trouble, since they'd been out all night. Barry and his crew confront them, and Max realizes that since he just killed a vampire leader and stood in the face of a grotesque deity, three teenage losers are nothing in comparison. However, he still gets a beatdown in response.
Trivia
- Although he shares a surname with everybody's favorite lovable psycho vigilante, as A.C. Farley notes in the book's preface, he's named after the protagonist in Robert A. Heinlein's novel Starman Jones.