TMNT Revisited: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures #21

Space Junk, Face Funk, Cyber Punk, Thief

Script: Dean Clarrain
Art: Byron Vaughns
Letters: Gary Fields
Color: Barry Grossman
Cover: Ryan Brown, Steve Lavigne, Ken Mitchroney
Edits: Scott Fulop, Victor Gorelick
Published by: Archie Comics
Cover Date: June 1991
Cover Price: $1.25

While a lot of the earlier issues of this series were ones that I could recall the basics of the issue’s events from before, just looking at the covers…I had this one chalked up as a random, forgettable one-off. I was a bit surprised (even as my memory of the events were rekindled) at some of the issue’s events.

Rather than a mutant-creature-of-the-month, this issue gives us a mutant/cyborg character in Vid Vicious. Vicious is an ordinary human fed up with bad news about the human-generated destruction of the planet. He gains the power to "do" something about it when a satellite fuses with chemical waste and crashes into the ground outside his cabin. Meanwhile, the turtles spar as they wait for April and Splinter…but before those two can rejoin them, Vicious appears through April’s computer monitor and kidnaps her. It turns out he wants her to record/broadcast his message to the world before he disrupts world wide communications. Fortunately, Donatello’s able to track him, and the turtles arrive to save April. Our heroes gain the upper hand, and the cyborg tries to escape into a nearby computer, but Donatello hitches a ride and is pulled in with him. While the group tries to figure out how they might be able to rescue Donatello, Shredder with some Foot bots bursts in. As the bots are fought, Shredder messes with the computer, copying Donatello and Vicious to a disk before escaping out the window, leaving the turtles shocked and horrified at what they’ve just witnessed.

Vicious is hardly an inspiring villain, nor all that interesting to me. His existence is rather preachy and dated–this whole issue is–and leaves me rather cold. The story is very much of its time, and continues the trend of including an educational narrative within the fiction/fantasy of the issue itself. I’m just not all that appreciative of it right now as an adult. I’m definitely put off by the way computers are depicted here…but then, this comic is a QUARTER-CENTURY old, and computers (and their depiction in media) have come a long, Long, LONG way since early/mid 1991. Despite that–and strange as it may sound–there’s a part of me that sees Shredder’s disk with Donatello and Vicious as being akin to the flat-crystal Phantom Zone from the Superman films and later-2000s pre-52 DC continuity. In that sense I’m ok with it, abstract as that may be.

Visually we have another new/different artist on the issue, and though the style isn’t bad it’s a little weird-looking to me. The characters all seem a bit more cartooney than usual, and some of the perspectives seem just a bit "off" to me.

Shredder’s appearance is out of nowhere to me…though I can appreciate that from the sense of leaving us as readers on the same page with the turtles, there wasn’t even any foreshadowing that he was thinking of escaping, trying to escape, or had escaped prison, so even though I somewhat suspect that’ll be detailed in the next issue, for now with THIS issue it just came from nowhere.

As with #20, this seems somewhat filler-ish while the Mutanimals mini deals with the main payoff and action for the month, leaving this as a secondary story. I’m almost certain there’s recap in the next issue such that this one really isn’t essential to "get" that story. Given that, this is another issue than can be pretty easily passed by–It’s hardly a "mythology" issue and primarily only counts if you’re trying to read every single issue for the sake of having read every single issue.