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.

LOVE how Campbell lays out this fight scene.

#TMNT

Mmm? Changes in body, complicated emotions that're mostly the fault of our unthinkingly xenophobic world, creative outlets as a release, whaaaaaat?

#TMNT

So that was issue one! An issue of wall to wall set up that ends on a cliff hanger. It's interesting to come back to it knowing where the run's going to go and how shaky it's going to get.

There's a potentiality in Campbell's first story, people stuck in a world that's been broken, and it's that little bit more bittersweet knowing the characters never pull things back together as much as you'd hope. But Sophie's heart was always in the exact right place.

Sorry for the delays, anybody keeping up. Been moving between a new flat in Scotland and my parent's house in England a lot, so my brain's been feeling like it's stuffed with concrete.

Sally Pride, the conscience of Hob's Mutanimals team. She is sadly another causality of the comic getting slowed down and just how large the cast is, because watching her break away and her eventual role in Mutant Town deserved more.