Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/Naruto #1 | Review

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/Naruto #1
Writer: Caleb Goellner
Artist: Hendry Prasetya
IDW Publishing/Viz Media; $4.99

Crossovers are nothing new for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, who began sharing adventures with fellow independent comics characters like Usagi Yojimbo, Cerebus and The Flaming Carrot way back in the black-and-white 1980s. And ever since they were sold to Nickelodeon and licensed to IDW Publishing, their crossovers have only increased, as they’ve now met everyone from Batman, The Ghostbusters, The Power Rangers and He-Man to the casts of the Street Fighter video games and the Stranger Things Netflix show.

Even for such regular crossover characters though, the Turtles’ latest is something special, so much so as to be unique in comics—Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/Naruto sees Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s publishing phenomenon sharing narrative space with manga-ka Masashi Kishimoto’s Naruto, from the super-successful manga series of the same name. If any American comics characters have ever crossed over with a manga character before, I’m certainly not familiar with the resultant comic.

Charged with pulling this ultra-rare form of crossover off are writer Caleb Goellner and artist Hendry Prasetya, and the creative team faces some serious challenges, including which version of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to use, how to get them into the same story as the Naruto characters and, more subtly but more importantly, how to tell the story, given the vast gulf of differences between American comic book storytelling and manga storytelling, which includes everything from pacing to attention of detail.

Wisely, they’ve essentially decided to Naruto-ize the Turtles characters, reinventing a new version of them that seems to exist organically in the world of Naruto. That’s certainly the best strategy, given the flexible nature of the Turtles (who have appeared in various iterations in comics, cartoons and movies over their four decades), versus that of the Naruto gang, who have only appeared in Kishimoto’s manga and its various adaptations and official spin-offs.

Perhaps unfortunately, but also likely inevitably, the comic both looks and reads like an American superhero comic, rather than an installment of a manga story, wherein the creators would have far more space to stretch time out. That means the fight scenes will inevitably be far shorter and less elaborately choreographed, but then, this is a comic book series destined for eventual collection in an American-style trade paperback, not a tankōbon.

The first issue opens with Naruto‘s Team 7—sensei Kakashi Hatake and highly-skilled pre-teen ninjas-in-training Naruto, Sasuke, and Sakura—tasked with escorting reporter April O’Neil (here coded as dark-skinned, as in the last few animated adaptations) from their own Leaf Village to her home in “Big Apple Village,” the Naruto world’s version of New York City (the Statue of Liberty and some skyscrapers are seen in the background, and look as if Prasetya dropped them into his art from online photos; not the most promising first page of a comic, then).

They are confronted by The Foot Clan, here lead by someone in a fox mask and sporting a tail, but no sooner do the Foot appear than smoke bombs are thrown and a set of four familiar ninja weapons held by green hands emerge from the smoke to konk the bad guys out.

When the smoke clears, the Foot has left and Team 7 is facing a group of five warriors, who are obviously Master Splinter and the Turtles, though all fairly radically redesigned and sporting masks similar to the one worn by the Foot leader.

Superhero team-up rules apply, and the two teams fight; April briefly considers clearing up the misunderstanding but ultimately decides to let the battle continue so she can catch it all on film. After nine pages devoted to the fight, in which the characters all pair off (the Turtles, who outnumber Team 7, double-team Naruto), Kakashi unmasks Splinter and the Turtles and intimates that he knows who Splinter really is, calling him Hamato Yoshi, the name of the man who mutated into an anthropomorphic rat in the original 1987 Turtles cartoon (which seems to be the version that most influenced the creators’ particular new take on the characters).

It’s not much, really, but then it is just a first issue, running a paltry 22 pages for its $4.99 price tag (the 190-page first volume of the Naruto manga, meanwhile, sells for $11.99). With the fighting out of the way, the next issues should introduce the characters to one another and start exploring the conflict April hints at in a short passage of this issue.

In other words, the most interesting stuff, including the origins of these Turtles and how their characters fit into Naruto‘s world, is yet to come.

The book seems written under the assumption that readers will already be familiar with the two sets of characters—a likely assumption, as what reader who wasn’t would be all that excited to check out their meeting one another like this? Still, some effort is put into introducing Team 7, in the form of a scroll Kakashi consults on the first page, and all of the characters are named and show off their skills and a bit of their personalities during the fight.

This fight, which, again, constitutes the greater part of the issue, is well choreographed and “fair” to all its participants, although I wasn’t crazy about the way it was drawn. Prastya’s designs, renderings and character work are all sharp—everyone looks like they should and, for the most part, moves as they should—but he has a tendency to draw characters or parts of the characters out of focus when in action, an attempt to evoke filmmaking that seems unfortunate for a comic/manga crossover like this.

Of course, maybe I’m being unfair. There’s an awfully good chance that anyone coming to this book is doing so not because of the comics and manga, but because of the cartoons and anime, which includes TV shows as well as films, and thus the technique will be better received by many in the audience than it was by me.

Wherever readers became fans of the characters, though, they should delight in this extremely unlikely yet quite well constructed crossover.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/Naruto #2 is scheduled for a January release.

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