Heroes in a Half Shell: Turtle Tracks

The Good Guys: Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, Michelangelo, Splinter, April O’Neil (All first appearance).

The Bad Guys: Bebop (Human), Rocksteady (Human), Bebop & Rocksteady’s Gang (Four Unnamed), Shredder, Foot Soldiers (All First Appearance)

And the Rest: Vernon Wells, Burne Thompson (First Appearance)

In a Half-Shell: April O’Neal reports on a wave of thefts to scientific operations.  She is abandoned by her crew as an armed mob confronts her.  She flees to the sewers where she is saved by four humanoid turtles.  The turtles introduce April to their master, Splinter, and agree to help her investigation, leading them to a Ninja-themed shopping district.  April investigates a security services building and is captured, then rescued by the turtles who flee the building as it is flooded to destruction.  Splinter recognizes that the soldiers the turtles fought were garbed in the wear of the Foot Clan.

Full Synopsis:

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Where it all begins…again!

How funny is it that Marvel has to put out a reading chronology book for its trade paperback collections because they keep renumbering them so much that even the collected volume numberings don’t make sense?

Truly the master inventor

 

From X-Factor #70 by Peter David and Kirk Jarvinen

 

 

eXaminations Catch-Up

Though new comics did just come out for yesterday, May 25, I thought that instead of just picking up midway through storylines, I’d jump back a couple months and play a quick game of catch-up from the start of the new direction of Blue/Gold era X-Men.  That means our starting point will be March 29’s releases in which we will be looking at X-Men Prime #1 which gives this whole era its launch, as well as the wrapping up of All New X-Men #19, in which the time-displaced original X-Men come back together to get in place for their new book X-Men: Blue.

Anyway, since we’re doing an “everything old is new again” redo for the X-Men line, Prime is a good enough nostalgia title for nerds like me to appreciate.  But before we jump into it, let’s talk about just why X-Men so desperately needed this rebranding for its line.  After all, once upon a time, X-Men was Marvel’s flagship property, top of sales, with some stuff that simply could do no wrong.  Unfortunately, those days are long gone.  Numerous redos, new directions, retreads, and shocking twists and turns moved X-Men way past the status quo, far beyond uncharted waters, and pretty much to Hell.  Actually, in the storyline, that can be taken literally.

Reading comics again

Now that Marvel has finally gotten the proverbial stick out of their proverbial butt and let the X-Men be the frickin’ X-Men again, I’ve found myself back into the foray of reading comics.  And when I read comics, I tend to have lots and lots of opinions about them.  Thankfully, I have a blog for that!

Coming soon will be the restarting of my eXaminations bit where I go through what’s going on in the X-Men world, and I’ll probably do it on an individual issue basis so I don’t let the pile grow to the point where there’s more work than thought.

But I’m not just reading X-Men, dear friends.  I’ve also been sticking my nose into other books that tickle my fancy and I will be sharing thoughts on those as well.  The main one, of course, is the Whatever New Relaunch Blue Beetle book which has the return of Ted Kord!  And why isn’t he dead, you ask?  Because in this world, he never died.

So look for that.  But before I leave, I will give you a little bit of joy I found in my readings, coming from April’s Spider-Man/Deadpool #16 by Joshua Corin and Scott Koblish.  The setup is that Deadpool, Spider-Man and Cami Van Helsing have traveled to Latvia to convince Dracula to lead his Vampire Army against their monster-leading villain.  Unfortunately, they find Dracula uninterested in doing anything of the sort, being perfectly fine living his life down in the basement playing online games while a minion regularly sends him victims to feed upon via trap door slide from the toilet.

So Cami Van Helsing pisses off the undeadman to the point that he’s ready to kill her fabulously, but Spider-Man challenges the gamer in him to a video game fight in which Cami plays as Spider-Man and Dracula plays as, well, Dracula.

Enjoy.

A little BWAH HA!

Reluctant acceptance

Anyone who has been with us for a while probably knows that despite being a huge X-Men fan, my all-time favorite superhero is the second incarnation of the Blue Beetle, Ted Kord.  I’ve loved the guy for years and have endured having to explain who the hell he is pretty much any time someone new finds out that I’m a huge comic nerd and asks “Who’s your favorite?”

You probably are also well aware that it absolutely broke my heart when DC finally gave him a spotlight issue that made people see him as the awesome hero I always knew he was, only to put a bullet in his head at the end and replace him with a new, hip youngster with the way too overboard power set of “CAN DO EVERYTHING.”

But with the most recent run of Blue Beetle, starring both Jaime Reyes AND Ted Kord, I’ve finally begun to move towards the possibility of accepting Jaime and even liking him.  And then, in issue #8, he does this:

Okay, kid.  You got me.  I like you.