Dreamwave TMNT # 2

 By Mark Rodriguez

Back in 2003, Dreamwave made a short-lived comic book series based on the 2003 Ninja Turtles cartoon. The first four issues were based on the first four TV episodes before issue five and onward went with original stories. Rather than adapt the episodes the best they could, Dreamwave went with choosing a character and setting the story from their point of view. This time we take a look at April O'Neil.

"A Better Mousetrap"  opens with April, as a kid pretending to be a news reporter asking her mother to comment on what dark and evil thing she's brewing. April's mom says that's enough Sixty Minutes for her and tells her she is only working on dinner. April asks what's for dinner and her mother says it's turtle soup. April isn't thrilled and her mother says she's just like her father, afraid to try new things. April asks to see the soup and her mother tells her to be careful. As April looks at the soup, she says it seems to be looking back at her. Just then the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles leap out of the soup scaring April and her mother.

The Turtles start fighting against Mousers. Leonardo says the way to stop them is to slice off their heads. Michaelangelo says that's convenient for the Turtles that have the blades. April and her mother hide under the kitchen table. Her mother tells April to keep quiet. April says those are Turtles but she asks about the things they're fighting against.

April snaps out of her daydream/flashback as Baxter Stockman does a practice presentation for his Mousers. April misses her cue and is remembering that as a girl she always wanted to be a news reporter. She asks herself why she's a lab assistant now. Baxter says it's because he's hired her and it's a decision he's starting to question.

We have a flashback with April and her father as they're driving. April is asking about the deal where if she got enough grades she could choose what college she wanted to go to. Her father said that was before she wanted to get intro journalism. He didn't want her to be putting her life in danger chasing tabloids. 

Her father adds that her science aptitude tests were high and asks how she could not want to be a scientist. April says she does want to be a scientist and changed her mind during freshman year. April feels off, like she is there and not there at the same time. She asks her dad if this is what it feels like to have her life flash before her eyes. Just then her dad slams on the brake as there's an explosion in front of them. 

The Turtles continue fighting with the Mousers. Donatello is impressed by their servos and articulation. Raphael asks why he doesn't just marry one already. Leonardo tells Mike and Donnie to lead the Mousers towards him so he can slice them up. Donatello tells them to try to keep one intact so he can study them. Leonardo offers no promises. April says it's happening again.

 

Baxter snaps her back to reality and says they are rehearsing again until they get it right. Stockman rehearses his speech with the saying 'if you create a batter mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door'. On cue, April comes in with a box of lab rats and she sets them loose in a maze. As Baxter unleashes the Mouser, April sees a figment of her kid self, and the box she is holding turns into a Ninja Turtle plushie. The plushie tells April that her boss is evil. April says he doesn't know that, and the plushie says she had to have known when she was on the TV broadcast with Baxter.

April had said she felt lucky to have her family and friends watching her work alongside the Baxter Stockman. Baxter is flattered. April's computer suddenly beeps and Baxter inquires about that. April says she ran a diagnostic check and half of the Mousers haven't transmitted, almost as if they vanished. Baxter says it must be a computer glitch and they'll go over it in the morning.

April says the Mousers might have been tampered with and they should check their backup transmissions. Baxter tells her not to worry about it and excuses himself for a meeting with a very significant financial backer. 

Kid April appears and asks her adult self if that was the moment she knew something was wrong, which lead to her eavesdropping on Baxter. April says she only wanted to discuss the computer discrepancies further. Kid April asks if that's why April ended up with her ear against the door. 

April overhears the person speaking to Baxter, telling him that the first Mouser test run was a complete failure... and he does not tolerate failure. Baxter says he'd make a lousy scientist. He says the test run was supposed to expose any design flaws and he will create the next batch with greater durability. He says the Mousers will perform flawlessly for the next phase of their plan. The mystery man says they better... for his sake. April is shocked to hear this.

The Raph plushie tells April that she should have known that Baxter was up to something nasty. April drops the plushie in the trash just as Baxter steps into the room. Baxter tells her not to work too late since he hates to pay overtime. With Baxter gone, April decides to see what he's up to. Kid April follows, saying she'll make a good reporter yet. April tells her imaginary kid self to shut up. 

 

As April checks on Baxter's files, she finds the Foot Clan symbol, which she never seen before. Her dad, another figment of her imagination, tells her not to do this and to think about her future. April flashes forward to being in the sewers, surrounded by Mousers. Before one can bite her, a sword slices its head off. The Mouser is out of order. This bring her back to another flashback with her mother as they were stuck in an elevator that had gone out of order. April tells her mother that she feels that her life is also out of order.

April goes to the sub-basement, wondering what Baxter would even have down there. She sees a crazy amount of Mousers being manufactured. April says it doesn't matter how bad the city rat problem is, this is serious overkill. Baxter appears behind April and tells her that his army of Mousers will make him a rich and powerful man. April says he's already rich and powerful. Baxter says he will miss her. April asks if she's fired. Baxter says 'in a manner of speaking'  as a mechanical arm grabs April and throws her out of the area.

Baxter tells April that he can't allow her to live since she has seen to much. The Mousers start coming after her. The kid April tries to interview one of them, asking if they're evil. The kid April screams off-panel. A figment of Raph, acting as a shrink, says the symbolism is very striking and then asks her about her mother. 

April tries to defend herself with a fire extinguisher but one of the Mousers bites into it. She makes a run for it and Baxter says she can't escape his Mousers. Running through the sewers, April calls out to her parents, her kid self, even to the 'weird turtle-guys' she keeps seeing. Her father tells her he warned her about her investigative reporter instincts and now it's too late. The Mouser lunge out to bite her but something slices it in half.

The Turtles wreck the Mousers, all of them using different martial arts yells. Michaelangelo tries to yell out Cowabunga, but his brothers all tell him to shut up. April thanks the people who saved them, until she realizes that they're walking talking turtle-guys and passed out.

Later on, April wakes up in the Turtles home. One of them says she was dreaming and kept muttering about her parents. April slowly wakes up fully, saying that it was crazy to think that Baxter was some sort of mad scientist and that there were something as ridiculous as karate turtles. Michaelangelo says he prefers Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. April passes out again. Michaelangelo asks if he can keep her.

 

My Thoughts- 

So this one was pretty wild as the whole issue was pretty much April re-living the events of the day but with these constant flashbacks and figments of her imagination in the form of her parents and herself as a kid. I guess the main takeaway was that as a kid April always dreamed of being a TV news reporter and somehow shifted gears into becoming a scientist. While in the 2003 show itself, April loved being a tech-head of sorts, this comic plays it as if April made the wrong choice in life and was stuck with regrets. Sure, this seems to be a case of 'had she not become a lab assistant she would never have had Baxter try to send Mousers to kill her', but I mean... how would she have known? How does choosing the wrong person to work for somehow mean you chose the wrong overall profession? 

This is where the comic and the cartoon its adapting seems to clash a bit. One thing to remember is that the Turtles were never about pizza and cowabunga in the original Mirage comics. The 80's Fred Wolf cartoon, as well as Turtlemania cemented those things as part of the Turtles lore in the mainstream. Not just the cartoons, but the games and live action movies at the time followed the trend of 'these radical dudes that loved pizza'. To this day I can't think of a Ninja Turtles videogame where the health refill item isn't pizza. That said, the biggest burden the 2003 cartoon had was to separate itself from the first cartoon and try to stand out as something different. The 2003 show mixed adapting Mirage stories with all new stories and characters, so it was the furthest thing away from being some sort of 2003 remake of the Fred Wolf show. As seen in this comic, the first season's early episodes had sort of a running gag of the turtles stopping Michaelangelo from saying Cowabunga. One of the episodes, Notes from the Underground, even had Raph tell Mikey 'no more Cowabunga'. 

It seems the Dreamwave guys didn't quite get the memo. In this comic, April feels she missed out on her true calling of being a news reporter, which ties into her 80's cartoon incarnation. The comic delivers an odd message where on one side April feels everything in her life is wrong because she didn't become a reporter 'in this life', and on the other side, it's shown that her 'investigative reporter skills' almost got her killed. It's almost as if the comic is saying April is wrong for not being closer to her 80's counterpart.

Since this is made up for the comic, none of this will ever get addressed again later. Like I mentioned earlier, the 2003 cartoon April is content being into science and eventually running the Second Time Around shop. This comic was out July 2003, and later on in 'Secret Origins Part 3' first aired in January 2004, April did pretend to be a news reporter to buy the Turtles some time to escape the TCRI building undetected, yellow jumpsuit and all. When the Turtles asked her if she was a news reporter now, she responded with 'Ha! In another lifetime maybe'.

 

The other things you'll notice in later issues is that there will be several references to pizza, even though the cartoon was trying its best to avoid having the Turtles eat it. While pizza was mentioned in the 2003 series, it was not literally the only thing they ate like in the Fred Wolf show. It's probably the first time in the mainstream that the Turtles were shown eating other things like Chinese take out and hot dogs.

The comic was interesting for what it was. It mixed in scenes from the actual episode, like Baxter's conversation with Shredder, with all this weirdness with April's parents and her kid self running alongside with her. Again, the Turtles were barely in it, only shown in quick flashes of them attacking the Mousers.. or for some reason.. in the form of talking Raph plushie. While re-reading this I was wondering if April was just having a full on mental breakdown until I saw that this was all a dream that took place while she was unconscious. I guess all the weirdness hit her all at once and the dream was her way to try to process it.

The comic continues the Dreamwave trend of being drawn overly stylized, overly dramatic angles or  facial expressions (especially for Baxter) and everything being colored under this grey-ish filter, making the colors very subdued. I'm not sure why they chose this route, especially for the entire run, to my recollection,  but any greyer and the comic would be flat out greyscale.

The last thing I'd like to bring up, which can only be done in retrospect since back in July 2003 one would have no way of knowing that this comic would end at issue 7, is the fact that the Turtles will never face the Shredder outright. The first season of the series took it's time, showing Oroku Saki acting sus here and there and one episode even ending with him wearing one of his infamous bladed gauntlets. Sadly since they only adapted the first four episodes, Saki mostly stays in his 'mysterious evil business man' phase and the Dreamwave comics will never get to show him in full Shredder armor. And we'll definitely never see his Utrom reveal.

One ad that stood out to me was one for Dreamwave releasing comics based on several Capcom titles like Megaman, Rival Schools and Darkstalkers. I either didn't know or completely forgot that Dreamwave ever had the Capcom license. I mostly remember them from their Transformers Energon comics and the 2003 Ninja Turtles series. I'm also a bit confused by the timeline. Megaman makes sense since Archie didn't start making his series until way later in April 2011. When it comes to Darkstalkers though, Udon started making that series in 2004 so what gives? After doing some digging around, I found out that Dreamwave only got to make comics for Megaman, Devil May Cry and Maximo... but then went bankrupt before they could get around to Darkstalkers and Rival Schools. 

Faring worse than the 2003 Turtles, the Megaman comic only last 4 issues. It seemed to involve him fighting against a bunch of made-up Robot Masters with Heat Man being the only one from the actual games. With countless canon Robot Masters to choose from.. just... why? I mean Archie eventually made up a couple but they were sure to introduce all the ones from the games first. To add more salt into Dreamwave's wound, issue 4 ended with the promise of an upcoming Megaman X series... which also didn't see the light of day. Good god Dreamwave.... Such horrible, terrible luck.

Side tangent aside, we'll continue series as we look into Baxter Stockman and see things from his point of view.