By Dustin Cabeal

I fucking hate hero versus hero titles. The one and only time that it was enjoyable was DC vs Marvel (flip it, I don’t care), and even then, it was a mess of shit. That’s what made it charming – seeing the rage of the fanbases and concessions that each company had to make to keep certain characters powerful and protected. Otherwise, it’s pretty much the same dumb storyline of one or both sides of heroes being mistaken as villains and fighting each other, meanwhile the actual villains are agreeable, cordial, and already working with each other. I’ve lost track of how many of these franchises versus franchises IDW has made, but they're just to sell covers. Go ahead, ask how many covers they have for this first issue.

Thirty-one.

They cutely put “Collect them all” at the back of the issue before showing you thirty-one covers. Kudos to all the artists who got paid for the covers – get that money – but to the poor soul who felt they needed all the covers and spent God knows how many hundreds of dollars to get all the store exclusives… I wish you wouldn’t have. That purchase behavior is irresponsible and damaging to the industry as they focus on sales of covers rather than telling a story worth reading.

I can only imagine that Paul Allor has continued to write TMNT books for IDW in some capacity since I stopped reading them several years ago. At that time, he was on the main series and writing several mini’s that were in fact pretty good. He was paired with interesting artists and the serious tone of the book was directed towards the aged Turtles fan rather than pretending to be for children. And I will say that he does find the least dumb way to have our Turtles fight, he just has them in a fighting tournament. Pretty simple, it’s the start of every Street Fighter game/story. Sure, we never really finish the tournament or crown a winner. No one returns for the next year; they just keep finding and fighting each other.

The story begins with Raphael and Guile fighting each other. The Turtles (there’s five of them total, but I’ll get to that later) and the Street Fighters (there’s four of them) are standing ringside… blocking the view of everyone who paid to watch a man with stupid hair fight a giant fucking turtle. Literally no one is apprehensive of the giant turtle man in the ring. Both characters are martial artists, but this is a boxing match. They’re just slugging each other until we cut to Vega… sorry M. Bison and Baxter Stockman watching the fight. Bison is like, hey, I like this guy who is angry and obviously a good guy in the story. Baxter is like, “fuck no, we can’t involve the Turtles.” Seems like they could just be racist towards mutants and kick them out of the tournament at that point, but Street Fighter has always pretended to be fair and ran like a reputable organization.

The fight runs long so Mikey goes out and buys every bit of food he can from the high school concessions stand next to the bathroom and bumps into Chun Li who has also gotten hungry and bored watching Raph and Guile make ugly fighting faces. Then out of nowhere and seemingly only to clue our dumb heroes in on the plot, a woman comes up and asks Leo for help finding her lost husband who lost recently at the tournament and then went missing shortly afterward. Maybe if she had walked up to Donnie, he could have figured out the plot to this entire comic, but it was Leo, so he just goes back to focusing on their lame reason for being in the tournament to test their skills… for reasons. The story hasn’t revealed anything yet, but I’m sure it’s some throwaway plotline or just a pandering fact for the ongoing series.

M. Bison decides that he doesn’t take orders from Baxter Stockman and calls for the ref to call the fight in Guile’s favor so that Raph is free to exit the tournament. Bison’s brilliant plan is to kidnap one Turtle from a group of turtles, and he feels that no one will notice or care because he’s an idiot and the plot must go on. Guile and Raph both protest the called fight. Neither leave satisfied, which made me think that this is an allusion to both men’s suppressed sexual urges. I’m sure there’s other ways to read into that, fighting spirit or some shit, but I think they liked each other and didn’t know how to vocalize that due to years of machismo.

Anyway, Mikey and Chun Li are up next, but Mikey doesn’t want to fight, and Chun Li beats the shit out of him. Then he flirts with her, and she blushes. Let me repeat that, he flirts with her and then she blushes. What are we doing here? At this point why couldn’t Raph say something suggestive to Guile and we see Guile blush? Because that’s how pointless both things are to the story.

There’s a lot of walking and talking about the fight that ended too soon, but that had also gone on for too long. We meet the fifth Turtle who is not named Kirby and so they do not exist to me. I don’t know who the fuck they are or why they’re here. I assumed this was for long time fans of both series and that I wasn’t required to have read all of IDW’s series, but I guess I needed to be up to date on their TMNT universe before reading a book that should not be cannon. I will continue to ignore the fifth turtle as they only had one line of dialogue, which was still more than Donnie I feel.

At this point, another wife of a fighter comes up to the Street Fighter gang and asks for their help finding their missing spouse that went missing shortly after losing their fight. They also ignore this person, I mean ignore them, the dialogue isn’t responded to. They continue walking until Raph comes up to continue his fight with Guile… in the street, like a street fighter would do. Bison looks on, repeating to the audience that he’s totally going to ignore Baxter’s advice and involve the Turtles and infuse Raph with psycho powers.

When you have something like this, you must appease both corporations that own the properties. It’s not really for the fans and it’s not to appease the fans. I’m sure Allor tried his best, but it’s just a painful shilling of corporate properties. With thirty-one covers, no one is here to be moved by the story and that’s just the facts. We can pretend otherwise and I’m sure feelings are going to be hurt by me saying all of this, but it’s a basic story that manages to get to the end of the first issue without making either brand look bad. The fact that the mystery of the plot is told to both sides of the story in the same way is a new level of convenient writing. In the past, it was at least a puzzle with both sides being given one piece and when they worked together, they’d combine the pieces, solve the puzzle together, and stop the bad guys. Now they have the same piece. Like hey dum-dums, fighters are going missing – find them. I bet some of them have been mutated! I bet Blanka is a mutant and he and Mikey jump up and down for pizza together. It’s sickening how spot on I probably am with this story.

The art is just ugly. I’m not going to pretend it’s not. The Turtles' legs are disgusting and weird. They look like the artist Ariel Medel referenced a knockoff action figure, making them bulky and thick. I think there’s at least a couple of movies, TV shows, and a million comics that could have been referenced, but no. The Street Fighter characters looked like MAD magazine versions of themselves. Cartoonish, but detailed. I think the MAD magazine version would have been better (RIP MAD). Everything is thick and chunky. When you spend all your budget on thirty-one covers, you probably don’t care what the interior looks like. The coloring was muted and flat. It didn’t make either franchise look dynamic or alive. Hell, maybe the art is good, but the coloring was so bland it made the art feel bland and uninspired as well. It just didn’t come across as some dream project for Medel, but rather a paying gig that they’d move on from and hope for better work.

Maybe I’m being overly harsh. I mean, does anyone have any expectations for this comic? It doesn’t matter, it won’t change the course for either franchise. It’s just fan fiction, printed. But who was looking for this? As someone who is a long-time fan of both franchises, I cringed when I saw this. I cannot imagine a younger reader being excited or caring about this either. Harsh, absolutely, but we should expect better when two blockbuster titles that have made billions collectively are slammed together. It should be world-changing and inspire a mania unseen before. Instead, Mikey flirts with Chun Li and she blushes.

Score: 2/5

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles vs. Street Fighter #1
IDW Publishing