Sophie Campbell
She slowed the Turtles down, let them grieve, gave the team its first new member in thirty-five years — and then ran the flagship book for fifty issues.
Part One
The indie apprenticeship
Sophie Campbell did not come up through superhero comics, and it shows in the best possible way. A Savannah College of Art and Design graduate, she spent her first decade writing and drawing creator-owned books about young women's bodies, friendships and bad decisions: the long-running Southern-gothic slice-of-life Wet Moon at Oni Press, the post-apocalyptic The Abandoned, Water Baby for DC's Minx line, and the scrappy superhero fable Shadoweyes. The throughline of all of them is the thing she would eventually bring to the Turtles — the best emotional acting in American comics. Campbell characters slump, fidget, take up space differently from one another. Her silent panels carry more story than most artists' splash pages.
Mainstream comics noticed. Her 2012 run on Glory with Joe Keatinge took a forgotten Rob Liefeld character and rebuilt her as a hulking, scarred, fully human war goddess — a redesign so beloved it overshadowed the original. In 2015 she launched IDW's Jem and the Holograms with writer Kelly Thompson, designing a glam-pop cast praised for making every body type read as glamorous. That same year she came out publicly as Sophie, becoming one of the most visible trans creators in American comics — visibility she has carried into how she writes and draws community, family and identity ever since.
Part Two
Northampton: the quiet revolution
Her first major Turtles arc almost shouldn't have worked. After the City Fall epic left the family broken — Leonardo brainwashed and barely recovered, the brothers beaten — IDW handed the book to Campbell for Northampton (TMNT #29–32, 2014): four issues at April's family farmhouse in which almost nothing explodes. The Turtles grieve, argue, fish, and slowly knit back together. In a franchise built on action, Campbell drew an arc about recovery — and it landed as an instant classic, regularly cited among the best stories IDW ever published. Nobody else on the roster could have drawn it, and everybody knew it.
The location was no accident either. Northampton, Massachusetts is where Mirage Studios actually lived — the arc is simultaneously the series' emotional reset and a love letter to the property's birthplace. That dual fluency, deep feeling wrapped in deep franchise literacy, became Campbell's signature.
Part Three
Jennika, and the keys to the book
In 2019 Campbell, with writer Tom Waltz and artist Ken Garing, did something no creative team in thirty-five years had managed: added a Turtle. Jennika — a human Foot assassin saved by an emergency transfusion of Leonardo's mutated blood — went from fan controversy to beloved core cast member in roughly six issues, almost entirely on the strength of her characterization and design. A fifth Turtle had been attempted before, in 1997, and rejected by fans so hard the character was erased. Jennika stayed. That's the difference craft makes.
Then IDW handed Campbell the entire book. From #101 in 2020 she became lead writer of the flagship series — with Kevin Eastman and Tom Waltz stepping back to story consultants — and frequently its cover and interior artist as well. Her Mutant Town era walled off a district of New York full of new mutants and reshaped the series around community, found family and consequence, while keeping the ninja fights that pay the rent. She steered it all the way to the giant-sized #150 finale in 2024 — fifty issues, the longest unified creative tenure on a Turtles ongoing since Eastman and Laird themselves, and the first to be both written and drawn by the same person since the founders.
The Wall
The essential Campbell
TMNT #32 — Northampton, Part 4
Cover and arc interiors by Sophie Campbell.
Buy this issue at MyComicShop ↗
The close of the arc that announced her. Four issues of grief, recovery and farmhouse quiet after City Fall's carnage — the story that proved a Turtles comic could put down the weapons for a month and come back stronger. Still the first thing fans cite when her name comes up.
TMNT #101
Written and drawn by Sophie Campbell.
Buy this issue at MyComicShop ↗
Day one of the Campbell era. Mutant Town is walled off, the family is fractured, and Jennika is on the team. The book's center of gravity shifts from war stories to "what do we owe each other" — and the readership followed. There are five Turtles on this cover, and by the end of the issue you accept it.
TMNT #114 — Cover A
Cover by Sophie Campbell.
Buy this issue at MyComicShop ↗
Peak Campbell cover design from the Time After Time stretch: bold shapes, clean silhouettes, relationships doing the storytelling instead of a fight pose. Her covers from this period read like indie graphic-novel jackets that wandered onto a licensed book — and they made the wall of every comic shop look better.
TMNT #117 — Cover A
Cover by Sophie Campbell.
Buy this issue at MyComicShop ↗
The other half of the skill set. When Campbell does go big, the action lands harder because her quiet pages earned it — anatomy, expression and motion all on model, "on model" being a model she largely defined for the modern era.
Last Word
Why Campbell matters
Eastman gave the Turtles their grit. Santolouco gave them their mythology. Campbell gave them an inner life. She proved a forty-year-old action property could carry stories about healing, identity and found family without losing the fights — and she did it from both chairs, writing and drawing, across the longest unified run the franchise has seen this century. The first new Turtle in the team's history wears her fingerprints, and the emotional vocabulary she brought from indie comics is now simply how Turtles stories get told. Properties survive on reinvention. Campbell's reinvention was to make you care.
Artwork via Turtlepedia community uploads (CC-BY-SA) and public auction records, self-hosted on the ninjaturtles.tv image CDN. Part of the ninjaturtles.tv Artist Series.