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News · 2026-09-16

Saturday Morning Adventures Signs Off on September 23, and the Finale Goes Back for the Heart of K'Avila

By ninjaturtles.tv news desk

Saturday Morning Adventures Signs Off on September 23, and the Finale Goes Back for the Heart of K'Avila

A cartoon that resets itself every week never has to remember anything, and for the better part of a decade the 1987 show did not: the Turtles ate a pizza, Shredder lost, and next Saturday started clean. The comic built on top of that show has been doing the opposite since 2022. Its last issue opens by going back for a relic it left with Splinter in a one-shot.

IDW released a preview of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Saturday Morning Adventures #41 on Tuesday, through an exclusive at AIPT, and NickALive carried it the following morning. The issue is the extra-sized series finale, it is on sale Wednesday September 23, and it comes from writer Erik Burnham, artist Sarah Myer and colourist Luis Antonio Delgado.

IDW’s synopsis promises “a final battle with some evil geese from another dimension, an appearance by a heroic duck, and even a peek at the future of Old Man Mikey, who we last saw in the Battle Nexus crossover”. Out of context that is a shopping list of nonsense. Set against the run, every item on it is a callback, and the preview pages pick up the first one.

They open on April at the kitchen table, telling Splinter about the time she was zapped into a world of anthropomorphic birds chasing an artefact called the Heart of K’Avila. In her account the Heart answers any question put to it, one question per person, and the geese were lining up to ask it how to take over their world permanently. April came away with the relic instead, and Splinter was asked to keep it somewhere safe. An editor’s box in the corner of the page sends the reader to the April Special, the 2024 one-shot where she met Ace Duck and raided the temple it came out of. Then she says it: “To be honest, Master Splinter, I’d kind of forgotten about it until…”

The book has been stacking up material like that since 2022. Saturday Morning Adventures started as a four-issue miniseries by Burnham and artist Tim Lattie, sold as four lost episodes of the 1987 cartoon, and IDW still collects those four as Volume 1 [1]. The ongoing arrived the year after and ran to 41 issues. Around it came a Halloween special, the April Special, a crossover with Usagi Yojimbo, the Battle Nexus event that put an older Michelangelo on the board, and an all-ages On The Go book this year. Four issues of pastiche in 2022 had turned into all of that by 2026, and our own comics archive has been logging it issue by issue.

There is a fair argument on the other side: a series doing 1987 should feel like 1987, which means self-contained, disposable and light, and threading a relic from a one-shot into the last issue is the kind of continuity the cartoon never asked anyone to carry. Burnham’s answer has been to keep both. Each issue runs as a complete adventure, but the connective tissue is left where a reader who wants it can find it. The geese are a punchline if you have never met them and a payoff if you have.

What to buy, and when

The finale reaches comic shops on Wednesday September 23, the same day as the TMNT: The Mirage Years 1984-1987 compact collection [2]. IDW’s own store is selling a foil-covered exclusive edition of #41 with art by Jesse Hernandez, limited to 500 copies, at $20.00. Its listing has the comic shipping on September 21, ahead of the shelf date, and the edition was still orderable this morning.

Foil exclusive cover for TMNT: Saturday Morning Adventures #41, a stylised Splinter in red robes with claws raised, drawn by Jesse Hernandez in his Urban Aztec style

For the run itself, the collections are the cheaper way in, and they stop short of the ending. Volume 8 gathers issues 27 to 31 and is in stock at BigBadToyStore at $16.99, read off the listing this morning. Volume 1, the original miniseries, is $14.99 direct from IDW and Volumes 2 through 8 are $16.99 each there. Nothing collecting issues 32 to 41 has been listed yet, so the last stretch is a single-issue job for now.

Not a bad memory for a book that opened by promising nothing would stick. The geese stuck!

Sources

[1] The 2022 miniseries and the 2023 ongoing are numbered separately, so a reader chasing issue 1 will find two of them. Our archive files them as the 2022 series and the 2023 ongoing.

[2] AIPT’s weekly rundown also dates TMNT: The Hunger one-shot, Tales of the TMNT: Fugitoid Frenzy and Turtle Power Pack Volume 4 to September 30.

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