Month: June 2024

TMNT: The IDW Collection, vol 1

When IDW launched its Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series by Kevin Eastman, Tom Waltz, and Dan Duncan in 2011, I picked up the first couple of issues and stopped there. I'm sick to death of reboots, I'm not interested in reading the umpteenth iteration of the origin story, and the pacing felt glacial.

But I've picked up a few issues and trades here and there over the years, and liked them a lot, so I've occasionally thought about getting into the main series.

As of this posting there's a Humble Bundle featuring the first fifteen volumes of TMNT: The IDW Collection, plus The Last Ronin, a TMNT riff on Dark Knight Returns which I've heard a lot of good things about. So I went ahead and snagged it.

I read TMNT: The IDW Collection vol 1, which collects the first twelve issues of the series plus an 8-page story from the 30th Anniversary Special and five "micro-series" issues (one for each Turtle, plus Splinter). And I liked it, but it also reinforced my initial impressions from 2011.

It is decompressed as fuck, but it feels pretty brisk in this format, where you can breeze through a 22-page chapter a couple of times a day instead of waiting a month in-between. So I like the main series better this time, but the done-in-ones are still the best part. Particularly Donatello, which has the best writing (by Brian Lynch and Tom Waltz, with artist Valerio Schiti), and Leonardo, which has the best art (by Sophie Campbell, with writer Brian Lynch).

As for the main arc, well, it sure does hit a lot of the expected plot beats. Turtles and rat get mutated by glowing green ooze of alien origin, Raph meets Casey and they beat up some street thugs together, Michelangelo has a holiday-themed adventure, Donatello makes a human friend, Leonardo gets the shit kicked out of him by a whole lot of Foot ninja, the lair is attacked by Baxter Stockman's Mousers, Splinter is captured, the Turtles meet April (who faints), they infiltrate the lab where the ooze came from, Splinter is captured by the Foot, the Turtles hunker down in April's secondhand store then find out where Splinter is and go to save him, big fight with Shredder, end of the book. It's fine, even good-to-great, but most of it's a little familiar (and the stuff that isn't, like the new origin where Splinter and the Turtles are a reincarnated family from feudal Japan, doesn't necessarily work for me), and I'd rather see new stories than just riffs on old ones.

That said, the characters are there, and that's the most important thing. Raphael and Casey aren't as angry in this depiction as in most; they feel a bit more like the older versions from Mirage's TMNT vol 4, who'd grown up a little and gotten some perspective. Donatello, by contrast, is kind of a dick; he knows he's the smart one and he never lets anyone forget it. It's Don, not Raph, who's constantly butting heads with Leo and questioning his leadership. It's an interesting twist on the formula; it makes Donny a lot less likable than usual, but it sure makes him queasily relatable.

And some of the plot changes are good, and serve the characters better than in the original series, when Eastman and Laird were just making it up as they went along.

Like, the original 1984 TMNT #1 is kind of weird. Splinter sends his four 15-year-old sons out to settle a decades-old blood feud for him. That's pretty fucked-up! And nobody addresses that it's pretty fucked-up until about 50 issues later, in City at War, when (IIRC) Leo observes that they are caught in the middle of a gang-war because Splinter dragged them into this. And that's following all the other shit that's happened as a direct result of their killing the Shredder back in issue #1: Leonardo and Raphael both got beaten nearly to death, and April got her apartment burned down. None of those things would have happened if Splinter hadn't roped his boys into a revenge killing.

Which, in hindsight, really doesn't sound much like Splinter at all, does it? Eastman and Laird weren't thinking of long-term character development when they put together that first issue, they were just thinking of chop-socky tropes. (Oh God. Is that why the villain's name is Saki?) And most subsequent versions have, rightly, rewritten the story so that Splinter isn't the aggressor. Usually the Foot is up to some nefarious deeds and the Turtles run afoul of them without even knowing of their connection to the Shredder. This is one of those stories, with some mysticism thrown on about fate and karma and destiny.

Most significantly, at least for Splinter's character, is that he only faces Shredder because he's forced to. He literally has to be dragged before the Shredder before he fights him, and even then he agonizes about whether he's willing to use lethal force — and only decides he's willing to kill because he thinks that's the only way to protect his family.

(He doesn't kill the Shredder, of course; this isn't the original series and they're not going to take him out that soon.)

I also like Leonardo calling out the Shredder for acting like he's a badass even though he's never won a fair fight. Like, what have we seen him do up to this point? Kill a woman and children, and then win one-on-one fights with Leo and Splinter but only after ambushing or kidnapping them and then making them fight like a hundred other ninjas first. The Shredder's only ever projected weakness, never strength, and Leo sees right through him.

All in all? I thought it was pretty good. I've got my gripes but I liked it, the potential is definitely there, and I'm interested to keep reading and see how it develops as they start to tell new stories and as Sophie Campbell becomes a bigger creative presence.

But maybe I'll get back to that Hellboy bundle first.

How to Strip DRM from Kobo Purchases

Expanded from a post at brontoforum.us, 2024-05-28.

I like the Humble Bundle. I've bought rather a lot of games, comics, and books there.

Usually the comics and books have been DRM-free, but recently they've had a couple of bundles, including a Discworld bundle and a TMNT bundle (still available as of this post), that, instead of being straight DRM-free file downloads, required that buyers redeem DRM-encumbered files from Kobo.

Fortunately, it's not difficult to strip DRM from Kobo downloads, so that you can read your books on whatever device and in whatever app you choose. Here's how:

Download and install Calibre.

Download DeDRM tools (make sure you get it from the noDRM repository, not the original apprenticeharper one; the latter is no longer maintained).

Extract the zip file.

In Calibre, go to Preferences → Advanced → Plugins. Click "Load plugin from file", browse to the directory you just unzipped into, and install both _plugin.zip files. Restart Calibre after both are installed.

Install Kobo Desktop (direct link to kobosetup.exe). Run it, log into your Kobo account, and download the books you want. Once they're finished downloading, quit out of the Kobo app.

In Calibre, click the "Obok DeDRM" link in the top bar. From there it's pretty self-explanatory; whatever books you select will be added to your Calibre library and you can find the epub files in your file browser.

That's it for stripping the DRM, but there's one more thing I noticed: it turns out that my comics reader app of choice, Perfect Viewer, doesn't really work very well with epub files; for some reason it doesn't support the same features for epub as it does for cbz/cbr/pdf files (eg automatically showing two pages when rotated). Fortunately, there's a dead-simple workaround: change the file extension from .epub to .cbz. (A CBZ is just a zip file of images; an EPUB is basically a zipped website. Change the extension from EPUB to CBZ and PerfectViewer just ignores the HTML files and looks for the images.) YMMV depending on your reader of choice; some will show side-by-side pages without issue (like Calibre's built-in reader) and the file extension trick may not work in others (since the images aren't at the root of the zip file; in that case you may need to extract the EPUB and then re-zip just the images into a CBZ file).

So Some Stuff Happened

So, to use a phrase that's appeared more than once over the course of the...Jesus Christ, 25 years? I've been writing this blog: I've been meaning to blog more.

It's been a wild couple of years. In 2022, my grandma Alice died; in 2023, I became a father. Maybe I'll talk about those things more, and maybe I'll just talk about Ninja Turtles comics and old Nintendo games. I haven't decided yet.