Earlier in the 2K12 series, I became rather spoiled with fairly decent TMNT TV delivered in 26 episodes per year. Now that the show has long since become mindless shallow phony crap, it's been a weird sensation returning to an older status quo of waiting for new good TMNT stuff to come out at a snail's pace, waiting months or even years at a time for something new that piques my interest.
As much as I love TMNT comics, they're painfully slow to update. IDW TMNT and Amazing Adventures update once a month, and Amazing Adventures' main storylines are maybe 15 some-odd pages of update. MNT Gaiden updates whenever Tigerfog gets around to making a new page, which these days seems to mean one new chapter per year. And just like Genndy Tartakovsky did with Samurai Jack, Peter Laird has put Mirage TMNT volume 4 on painfully long hiatus without ever officially cancelling it.
And I've still never really recovered from the sheer dismay of 2K12 going from awesome to horrible in just one year. Even months after I stopped watching new episodes, as a fan, it still hurts. I really, really wish it were still good (and preferably with the really damaging episodes never having been made), so I could have something good to watch more often than the comics update.
So where do I go for new and interesting TMNT when other sources update too slowly? Lately, it's been deviantART. I maintain eight separate TMNT-related favorites collections on my account there:
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
- Pre-Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Turtle Tots)
- Spike/Slash
- Splinter
- Raphael and Slash
- Michelangelo and Leatherhead
- Leonardo and Usagi
- TMNT Hindsight
The collections would feel more whole if not for Sneefee deciding to up and delete her entire deviantART gallery and all the awesome TMNT art in it. She still has other sites with the same art, but I'm not really big on linking Turtlepedia to hugely NSFW websites filled with a ton of other TMNT fanart (turtlecest) which I've never really cared for it—it was just easier to maintain collections of individual favorites on deviantART, you know?
Anyway, Myrling's Hindsight fancomic has actually become a really engaging read. It's inspired by the Mirage TMNT miniseries Blind Faith and Blind Sight, but it takes place in the 2K12 universe. And, in Mirage tradition (but not so much in 2K12 tradition anymore), it's not afraid to get really deep, serious and psychologically complex. This is where I think TMNT shines best—as a drama about life's challenges. In Hindsight (as with Blind Faith and Blind Sight), there's a violent incident during a mission that leaves Leo completely blind, unable to see. The comic is beautifully illustrated in stark black and white silhouettes, immersing the reader in Leo's sightless new world as he tries to compensate with his other senses and by relying on memory. Points for the really awesome Splinter scenes.
But all in all, good TMNT stuff has felt slow lately. I've heard good things about Mutants in Manhattan being based on IDW TMNT with a more mature bent, but I don't have a PS4 or Xbox One, and I'd be more likely to play a game like that on Wii U than on PC.