Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Untold Destiny of the Foot Clan #2 Review

 

Writer: Erik Burnham

Artist: Mateus Santolouco

Colorist: Marco Lesko

Letterer: Shawn Lee

Cover Artists: Mateus Santolouco; Edison Neo; Santtos;

Publisher: IDW

Price: $3.99

Release Date: April 17, 2024

 

Oroku Karai ordered her Foot Clan soldiers to learn about the Dog Star Clan. After scouring the streets for weeks, Natsu and Casey Jones show Karai a finger. Are her ninjas insulting her? Or have Casey and Natsu learned vital intel that will give the Foot Clan an edge over their rivals? Let's grab our katanas, leap into Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Untold Destiny of the Foot Clan #2, and find out!

 

Story

Karai hungers for revenge. The Dog Star Clan beat her to the Utrom device secreted in the Chincha Technology underground facility. They also beat her into the hospital. Toshiro brought her back from the brink of death but at the cost of his life. While Karai regained her strength, the Foot Clan squeezed local street gangs. When a Dog Star Clan soldier investigated the missing payouts, Casey Jones, Natsu, and Clyde were waiting for him. Casey and company thought they had ways of making the cyborg ninja talk. Their captive proved otherwise.

 

Karai’s mastery of magic doesn't include learning vital intelligence from a cyborg's finger. Worse, the Dog Star Clan knows what her people are up to. Karai decides to take matters into her own hands. Her target likes to end the day with a song. So in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Untold Destiny of the Foot Clan #2, Karai slips inside the Singing Rabbit karaoke club and seeks an audience with Tanaka Danno. Unlike Casey and Natsu, Karai knows how to make people talk.

 

While Karai hunts for information, Zodi seethes over their humiliating defeat. The Mutant Scorpion wonders if Karai is best suited to lead them to victory over the cybernetically enhanced Dog Star Clan. Science transformed them and gave them superhuman abilities. Karai can’t even keep Casey and Natsu from arguing. Is a nonmutated Human, even one with magical abilities, the best person to lead the Foot Clan?

 

 

 

Art

A Dog Star Clan ninja delivers a flying kick to a Frog ninja’s head. The cybernetic fist shatters Casey’s mask. When a sword slices into the cyber-enhanced soldier's armor, blood spills, and electricity arcs. Standing before the floor-to-ceiling windows of her penthouse, Karai studies the crackled metal finger. Then she tosses it to Casey before striding across her balcony and leaping off the railing.

 

 

Marco Lesko brings brilliant color to Mateus Santolouco’s art in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Untold Destiny of the Foot Clan #2. Purple letters replace yellow ones on the giant TV monitor in a blue, pink, and purple room. Subdued green, blue, and orange dominate the Foot Clan’s Mutant Compound, as Rocksteady and Bebop work out, Clyde eats pizza while playing a video game, and Zodi asks the mutant snake Krisa searching questions.

 

Shawn Lee fills white dialogue balloons and colored narrative boxes with black, uppercase words in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Untold Destiny of the Foot Clan #2. Words grow bold for inflection and rarely shrink. Lee helps us hear the Dog Star Clan soldier's armor reverberate, crack, sizzle, and hum. Skulls bang together amid throbbing music. As white words outlined in red waft through the karaoke club, we wonder if Karai enjoys her new life in Japan.

 

Thanks to IDW for providing a copy of this issue for review.

 

 

 

Final Thoughts

Casey Jones gives Karai a finger, Rocksteady gets Zodi's sting, people party with Edgar Allen Poe, and the Dog Star Clan reassesses their rival’s threat level in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Untold Destiny of the Foot Clan #2.

 

Rating 9.6/10

 

To preview interior art see my review at Comic Book Dispatch.