Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures (1988) #34 Comic Book Review

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures #34 is a confusing story. It's also the first Ninja Turtles comic I ever owned. The story being confusing probably stems from the fact that this issue continues a story that began in issue #33, one that I've never had in my collection and have never been able to track down a copy of. Because of that I'm actually missing half the story.

The Turtles, Master Splinter and a new character named Ninjara are in Tibet so that Splinter could visit his old friend, the Charlie Llama, only to find out that he's missing. Also there's a pregnant woman named Jang La who goes into labour as the Turtles are about to go rescue the Charlie Llama, who also happens to be a midwife. Yeah, this is a weird comic with way too many coincidences. Oh and all of this is linked to a petty Tibetan dictator.

Honestly, when I got this comic as a kid, I obviously didn't care about whether the story was good or not. I was just excited to have a Ninja Turtles comic. The early '90s was a weird time for the Turtles. The 1987 cartoon was starting to come down from it's height of popularity, but the Turtles were still hugely popular because of the live action movies that came out in 1990, 1991, and 1993. So while I missed the initial wave of Turtlemania, I still ended up having a few of the action figures, and saw the cartoon a few times though it wasn't something that I watched with any regular frequency like some of my classmates did.

One of the things that I like about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures is that they weren't afraid to create characters for the book, which never appeared in the regular book being published by Mirage Studios and didn't show up in the cartoon. They were there for the book and that's it. Which is something that The Batman Adventures, which started publication around this time, never did, as they used characters that were created for Batman: The Animated Series, like Harley Quinn, or had been created by DC Comics for the Bat family of comics. With the exception of characters like Jean Paul Valley (Azrael) and Tim Drake (Robin). Regardless, TMNT Adventures was great at being separate from the cartoon it was based on, after issue #7 or so, maybe a little bit later than that. To the point where Shredder and Krang hardly show up. They still show up occasionally, but the writers find plenty of ways for the Turtles to face adversity instead of just pitting them against Shredder, Krang and the Foot Clan constantly. It's almost as if Archie Comics didn't want to just do an adaptation of the cartoon. They wanted to make a Ninja Turtles comic book that could stand next to what Eastman, Laird and the guys at Mirage were doing with the main Turtles book. And while this particular issue isn't great, the decision that the guys at Archie Comics made definitely puts TMNT Adventures above other comic book adaptations of cartoons.

Final Thoughts and Rating: Overall this isn't a great issue. The pacing is super weird and it actually feels like this was supposed to be a single issue story, but the writer ran out of pages last issue and so they had to end the story in this issue. I've never read TMNT Adventures #33 so I don't actually know how much of their story they managed to tell in it. All I know is is that there wasn't much of a fight in this issue and nothing actually came of the Tibetan dictator. I'm giving Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures #34 a 6/10 simply because it was the first Ninja Turtles comic I ever got and the artwork is actually pretty solid.