Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Nightwatcher [IDW Publishing, 2024-25]

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Nightwatcher

Juni Ba (story), Fero Pe (art) & Claire Roe (art)

My rating: 3 of 5 Ω‘s

The Armageddon Games are over, the world is safe once again. In the aftermath, all our mutant heroes went through some soul-searching and the Hamato clan has left their home of New York and gone to find answers for themselves after the world-threatening, mind-bending, time-twisting, reality warping experiences that they’ve all had to face.

But with them gone, there is a vacuum. Enclosed behind its walls, Mutant Town remains, only now without the watchful eye of the Turtles to fight to keep the people together and the neighbourhood safe. The fledgling, vulnerable and isolated mutant community is struggling under the oppression and distrust of the humans beyond the walls as well as the chaos and crime that comes with lacking resources, support and governance. Into this place that struggles to keep its balance comes a violent new face – the Nightwatcher. Armoured, violent and mysterious, one wonders if this is a hero or something else?

Our protagonist is revealed fairly early on to be the only remaining Turtle on the block – Jennika.

Finding herself at sea with the departure of the rest of the Hamato clan, she has been struggling to find her place. She wants to help but outside of fighting the bad guys, she does not know another way and is even starting to question herself and fall back on her more literally-fighting instincts from her old life. On this journey, she seems to have stumbled onto some kind of armour – but the nature of it is unclear and revealed over the course of the story with some surprising impacts on the events as they unfold. Her relationship with her friends, her love life, everything is suffering the cost of this mission of violence, vengeance and vigilantism that seems to be consuming Jenny and there seems to be nowhere but further down into the darkness for her to go.

Enter Lao-Ban. A dangerous new gang-leader has surfaced and he seems to have dealings with the corrupt on the outside who want nothing but to exploit and destroy Mutant Town. He is no less savage than the Nightwatcher and seems to value mutant life no further than how far it serves his interest – and all of this means that sooner or later the two are on a collision course. Will Jenny be able to overcome the darkness binding and drawing her into the worst part of herself? Will she be able to survive her hunt for this dangerous new foe and his criminal army?

These are questions that make for a good story. Creator Juni Ba is to be credited for taking a good approach to this new journey for Jennika in the aftermath of all that has transpired. While the main TMNT series relaunches, this one does a good job of keeping us down to the ground for a gritty adventure focussed on the Turtle left behind. Jenny has had a unique journey til now, from loner to Foot Clan member to mutant to finding a new family with the Hamato Clan and all her new friends – a journey that now puts her back on a lonely path and a potentially intriguing one. In all honesty, I think for the initial issues I was entertained but the series was in danger of losing me because it seemed to be taking an approach that felt a bit too slow and meandering for me personally, but thankfully midway through the pacing issues started to lessen and more story started to unfold. Even the internal journey of Jennika took til about midway through to gain any real steam.

The artwork is undoubtedly the strongest aspect of this series. Artist Fero Pe is by now a familiar hand in this TMNT comic line, but I’ve seen some of his other work and it is impressive how he manages to have a more fluid and varied style – in this case he is able to bring in his own version of the style and sensibility that Sophie Campbell made such a cornerstone of the main series in the IDW version o the franchise for such a long time. More so, he adds some very nice touches, especially when the narrative switches to moments of flashback, etc, wherein the look, colour palette and all takes on a newer character than the rest of the comic, but not jarring. On top of that, the action scenes are planned and laid out very well, full of hard-hitting and lightning fast fights that you can almost feel as they unfold on the page before you.

Last but not least, special mention to the cover artwork. The primary covers are all gorgeous and that doesn’t even touch on the array of guest artist variants that IDW put out – I’m not a huge fan of the endless variants, but there were some really fun ones in this series and having some really good variants from talented artists seems to be a strength for this publisher.

Overall a good entry in the franchise and a nice new direction for a breakout character.