![]() I like the panel a lot, but like, it is a little silly that Bebop smacks Donatello with the computer keyboard, right? That’s not a specific action we need to worry about, but the deepening of the red in each successive panel is. Those hits get redder and redder as Bebop lays in to Donatello, but this is more about Pattison and Smith building the visual vocabulary for what’s about to happen than anything Bebop is doing. When Donnie makes a break for the door, or tries to pull himself off the ground, the environments are cool colors (blues mostly), and rendered in pretty clear detail. But those moments of abstraction are reserved for when our guys are taking hits. We’re starting here with yellow, and you’ll notice that as the fight progresses, the background colors fade through orange to red. First that that this is the first example in this fight of Ronda Pattison employing this hotter color palette for the abstract backgrounds. Rocksteady (again, it’s always Rocksteady) challenges this by spitting back “Who says we can’t hurt you?” And that’s when the hammer makes another appearance.Ī couple things to note here. These are our heroes: they can be battered and brainwashed and traumatized and humiliated and challenged, but they can’t really be hurt. It’s right here where writer Tom Waltz tips his hand a little bit, having Harold - via Metalhead - explicitly say “they can’t hurt me…” That is our expectation. ![]() Plus, Metalhead gets a classic hero-shot entrance - an awesome low angle, framed by the legs of his enemy, and protecting someone else from harm. I breathe a little sigh of relief, assured that that’s how Donnie’s going to make it through this encounter. Then Metalhead enters the fight, fulfilling that “hero in trouble” contract I was just writing about. Don’t get me wrong, Bebop’s pretty big too, but Smith is already forecasting who the real wrecking ball is. Smith is even cruel enough to indulge the reader’s fantasy that Donnie’s ninja training will get him out of this jam - the implied zig-zag of Don’s motions seem awfully electric on the page, but it’s nothing that damn hammer can’t put a stop to again. Reading left to right, Rocksteady’s enormous frame is literally the first thing we see. Also, Rocksteady’s massive size and the threat posed by that hammer is established immediately. Not only does Smith start the scene in media res, we start with Donnie disoriented - the character starts the scene upside down, for crying out loud. When we join the battle, Donatello is already scrambling. It’s a positively horrifying scene to read, and I want to walk through it beat by beat to discuss how it creates expectation, subverts it and ultimately forces the reader to look away.įor starters, it’s the longest un-interrupted scene in the issue, and at five pages, is roughly a quarter of the book. (Splinter gets reinforcements in the form of Nobody and Alopex when he needs back-up fighting Karai and her elite guard.) But Donatello is not afforded that luxury. Hell, it happens elsewhere in this same issue. Donnie’s been a even more of a loner than usual in this story arc, so seeing him ambushed - and outnumbered - has a pretty obvious solution, right? When our heroes are in trouble, help arrives - happens all the time. There are clever scuffs and twists throughout, but the real centerpiece of the issue takes place back in New York, where Bebop and Rocksteady have the drop on Donatello. The battle on Burnow island plays out much as we would expect it to: the bad guys fight, the good guys win, Baxter Stockman slips away. Tucked into the closing acts of the Attack on the Technodrome, Tom Waltz, Cory Smith, and the creative team on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles explores this vulnerability. The idea that Drew’s personality could be snuffed out by something terrible happening to his body is ludicrous, but it’s also completely true. If we had to seriously consider our own human fragility before starting our days tomorrow, how many of us could even scrape up the gumption to drive to work? The human body so such a fragile carrier for these personalities which seem so indestructible. That assumption is lie we tell ourselves, but perhaps it’s a necessary lie. Especially living, as we do, in the 21st century, with so many medical and technological advances, meaningful loss is an uncommon occurrence. Patrick: I think we all make a lot of assumptions about invulnerability. Today, Patrick and Drew are discussing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 44, originally released March 18th, 2015.
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