Leo'Jet Ski Fuel'nardo
What's nice about Campbell's Raph is that she doesn't depict his angst or being on his own as an inherently unhealthy thing. There's a well defined line between "Raph's being an asshole because of his temper" and "Raph just can't be around people right now".
Case in point, at the same time Donnie's flat out admitting the fam have no energy to go looking for him, and as much as he's butting heads with Al and Jen, Raph's actually doing a lot of good in Mutant Town. Could do -more-, but.
#TMNT
B) Good on Donnie, thinking of ways to help his bro but also wanting to respect his boundaries.
Our fist look at April (and I love Campbell's design for her because it's so distinct) and the signs of the toll years of TMNT stuff and her current job for Mayor Stockman is taking on her.
God, I love a good Sophie Campbell room. So full of character and little tells. My one note is Ronda Pattison's colours for the interiors so far have been all kinds of samey. Other than Don's caption there's nothing to indicate this isn't a room in the farmhouse.
Alopex is one of the few (if the not the only) IDW original characters I like, and I -love- that her storyline has taken her from this person trapped in a series of terrible relationships, stuck between two sides with baggage in a war she never asked to be a part of, to running a soup kitchen/homeless shelter for the victims of Mutant Town.
Best part is this comes from -Al's- experience, she knows what it's like to wake up in a strange new world, she's not passing on anything from the fam.
Oh, also more great character stuff for Donnie! I like how much of his instincts in this journal are to help people, and he's naturally going to become the handyman of Mutant Town in a couple of issues.
It's one the things I like about the Mutant Town concept as a whole. The TMNT not just as protectors, but as the guys who'll help you move and sort out your buggy wi-fi and just generally be around and helpful.
Chromedome and Rewind they ain't, but oh, the crazy rollercoaster these two are going to take us on.
Probably missed something in the previous 100 issues that'd explain why Raph wouldn't want to be in the same room with Jen, but it honestly works well enough on it's own: they've both been through a lot, he's a disgruntled teenager at the best of times, and Raph's just not in the mood to reconnect with anyone right now.
Which is the actual problem: it's not just that he's not ready, it's that, in the case of Jen anyway, he's not even going to try.
Here's a trick that's gonna sound simple once explained: Campbell not only draws this crowd of mutants at the next table and depicts their positions consistently, she introduces two new characters on pic#3 and consistently tracks their movements in pic#4.
Treating the room like an actual space you can move through, not just randomly filling it up, which she could be forgiven for doing!
This is going to be Jen's thing. Trying to work her way into the family while getting her own stuff together (including a relationship!)
She will both succeed and fail at both simultaneously, which is part of what made me switch from indifference to genuine interest in this specific take on a fifth turtle.
Lita! There she is!
Campbell's run doesn't get as much out of a lot of its concepts as it could, but she absolutely slam dunks with Lita. This poor wee thing is going to take some places, much like Shadow, Mirage Casey's daughter, does in Vol 2 of Tales of the TMNT. That premise of "How would someone taken in and raised by this mutant family actually turn out?"
Lita's situation is neat because "What would happen to the children?" feels like something that would probably be omitted from this kind of war/quarantine zoned story, especially one with protagonists that're already supposed to be adolescents.
Also, hopefully without assuming anything about Campbell's own experience, but, well, family abandoning members that are presumed not to fit anymore. Which is one of the pillars of her TMNT: family isn't -inherently- great.
We saw Raph taking down Mutanimals earlier and Al mentioned their hard assed police methods earlier in bits I omitted, and here we are seeing it in action: meting not only IDW's version of Mona Lisa but Jenikka's new personal rouges gallery, Bandit and Puggle! They're gay and not very good at antagonizing her.
Also just continuously establishing the Mutant Town problem. Hob's police are thugs and Raph beating on them hasn't really -done- anything so far.
