Review: ‘TMNT X Godzilla #1’ Delivers Nostalgic Saturday Morning Hijinks

Welcome to the table,

When I was a kid, I remember being constantly in awe at the concept of giant monsters. I would learn later in life that they were called Kaiju. And thanks to Pacific Rim and friends who were way more cultured than I was, that name just sounded cooler, so it came to be what I called the terrorizing titans, who were often depicted by people in rubber suits, toppling tiny towers, and clashing with one another in epic battles on grainy TV screens in a hazy room where an elder aunt chain smoked in her recliner.

One thing that very rarely concerned me in these stories was the people on the street. The normal humanoid-sized folks who transformed into giant robots pleaded to the King of Monsters for aid, were aliens from another world, or a litany of other things that drove the plot from monster fight to monster fight. The chattering and goings-on of those people were little more than commercial breaks in my mind between the titanic titans throwing down.

Now, as I have grown older, I have come to appreciate those very street-level human moments and the importance to the grander story and lessons playing out on the screen. I know I would be a fool, though, to try to convince you or myself that anything short of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or maybe He-Man could have made me care about anything other than Godzilla in a Godzilla film when I was a kid.

In that spirit, I am delighted to dive into IDW’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles X Godzilla #1, Let’s get into it…

Crafted by IDW Publishing, in collaboration with Paramount and Toho International, with writer Tim Seeley, artist Fero Pe, colorist Luis Antonio Delgado, and letterer Brian Kolek, TMNT X Godzilla is a wild take on the lore of both the storied TMNT world and the Godzilla mythos that sees some solid groundwork being laid in the first issue to explain how these two pop-culture worlds collide.

The first few pages of this book do some heavy lifting, showing us a pre-mutated Splinter and a pre-bucket head Shredder as ninjas in the Foot Clan squaring off against Godzilla on a beach of Odo Island.

This is not the first time the Foot Clan has fought Kiju, and as they somehow survived against the King of Monsters, this will not be the last.

As an aside, I’ve seen anime, a lot of anime, I have watched countless hours of cartoons, and played a library’s worth of video games, and my brain is still struggling to explain exactly how a bunch of people with metal weapons in fancy matching outfits somehow irritated Godzilla enough that he wandered away, but not enough that he obliterate all of them all with his atomic fire breath. The fact that there are any survivors of this fight baffles me, but we will get to that in a bit.

The book jumps to our boys in green fighting Bebop and Rocksteady in classic Saturday Morning fashion. I love the way Pe is rendering the Turtles in this book. Combined with the bright, vibrant colors that Delgado is bringing really works for me. This book looks rad as heck.

The menacing mutant henchmen of Shredder are trying to steal a briefcase from Professor Kinoshita, and each of our fearsome four gets a chance to show off before the bad guys are sent running while the Turtles and Kinoshita escape into the sewers.

We are quickly told by April O’Neil that Tokyo has been struck by a devastating attack, and once learning the news, Kinoshita tells the Turtles she must return to Japan. We are then given a lore dump by Splinter about Kiju that inhabit the islands around Japan and how they sometimes are guardians of mankind, but for the most part, they are just big old monsters who wreck stuff.

It’s a weird nostalgia battle in my brain as I read this book. I love this kinda stuff, but it feels like we are rushing through everything at disjointedly fast speeds to get to what my inner-child is hoping is going to be big old monster fights. The art is amazing, and everything looks dynamic and dazzling, but it’s hard to get the adult part of my brain to shut up about wanting more pacing and time spent figuring out bits about this now shared world, but little kid me would be flipping pages trying to find when the monsters are going to use their various special attacks on each other.

After Splinter’s lore dump, we learn that the Foot Clan lost against the King of Monsters. Of course they did! If Brendan’s* mythic monkey can’t beat my big green god, then how the heck are a bunch of stealthy sword swingers going to slay the actual King of Monsters? They aren’t. The answer is you don’t win against the King of Monsters. You survived, and apparently, both The Shredder and Splinter survived this encounter, but the loss by the Foot Clan further fractured the already breaking loyalty lines of the clandestine organization.

We then find out, thanks to Raphael spotting him in a projection of news coverage of what is going on in Japan, that The Shredder is in Japan as Godzilla is attacking. The book jumps to The Shredder leaping into a tunnel that takes him to the Technodrome, where he puts Godzilla’s blood into some mutagen that Krang, the alien multidimensional brain entity who drives around in a weird robot humanoid suit, declares is… Are you ready for this Saturday-Morning-Cartoon-Back-Of-An-Action-Figure Box Word…

Kaijutagen

Ha! Kaijutagen is delightfully dumb, and I mean that from the bottom of my heart. This is the kinda’ stuff that gets me to show up people. Just wacky comic book hijinks without. My inner child was thrilled beyond reason by this. (Editor note: This is an obvious Chekov’s gun for an eventual secondary mutation of the Turtles to kaiju size too, OR combining them with other legendary Toho kaiju.)

And yes … the book is not quite done with that kind of joy.

The next thing that happens is Casey Jones and the skateboarding icon and mutated lizard teen Mondo Gecko are stopping a mugger, only to feel the earth shake, look up, and be amazed as none other than King Ghidorah of the Stars, the three-headed alien dragon who spews lightning. Casey pulls out his phone and texts the Turtles, and the first issue of the story comes to a close.

The first issue looks so great. The story is a lot of fluff with establishing lore that explains, in a very brief way, that the Ninjas fought the Kaiju back in the day. We now know who the key players are, and hopefully, the next issue will deliver some big moments and some more wacky comic book nonsense.

I say “wacky comic book nonsense” in the most respectful and loving way.

Until next time, our man Tony has a review on the radical TMNT X Godzilla toys coming, and you guys need to keep your eyes out for that. We have been excited about this collab since we found out about it, and honestly, I feel like a kid in the lunchroom again, talking this level of wacky hi-jinks with my pal and collaborator over here at Comicon.com.

*Brendan is our senior editor, who argues with me that Kong is better than Godzilla. He is wrong. I know he is wrong. Godzilla knows he is wrong. Santa knows he is wrong. Everyone knows he’s wrong!