IDW puts the Archie Secret of the Ooze adaptation back in print on Tuesday, in its original colours

Archie printed the Secret of the Ooze adaptation once, as a one-shot dated Summer 1991, and IDW’s own solicitation calls it “a long-unavailable part of TMNT history”. It goes back on the shelf on Tuesday.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Secret of the Ooze, 35th Anniversary [1] runs 64 pages, written by Dean Clarrain and drawn by Jim Lawson. It is on sale 6 October 2026 at a list price of 9.99 dollars, under ISBN 979-8887245317, and Amazon has the preorder open ahead of release day.

IDW’s solicitation says the edition “presents the work in its original art and colors”. An Archie book of this vintage is cheap newsprint and flat separations, and the easy move on an anniversary reprint is to scrub all of that until the pages look like they were coloured last week. Six interior pages went out with the preview, and they have not done it. The Foot dig Shredder out of the dump under a wash of pink desert sky; Tatsu steps forward to challenge him in a maroon bathrobe, and the TGRI tanker on the facing page is the same flat blue it was when the book was stapled. The printed page numbers are still sitting in the corners!

Two pages from the Archie adaptation: the Foot pull Shredder from the dump, Tatsu challenges him, and April O'Neil interviews Professor Jordan Perry beside a TGRI tanker truck at the clean-up site.

Interior pages from IDW’s edition, via the publisher’s preview.

What a reader gets, then, is the version of these scenes that went out alongside the film rather than a tidied one. IDW’s copy also puts Tokka and Rahzar’s TMNT debut inside the book, the two mutants built for the sequel, who turn up on Lawson’s cover with Shredder looming behind them. The cover alone is worth the 9.99.

Our own catalogue entry for the Archie one-shot records a saddle-stitched comic with a glossy cover and a newsprint interior, dated Summer 1991, and no cover scan indexed against it at all. Nothing about the book was scarce when it came out, but finding a clean one to photograph, thirty-five years later, is a different problem.

For the film itself we have a page on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze, and if you are buying IDW books this month, The Hunger went orderable across all five covers on 30 September.

The right call on a book like this one was to leave it alone, and IDW has.

[1] The anniversary is counted off the film, which opened in March 1991. The Archie adaptation carries a Summer 1991 cover date.

Sources

Cover and interior art: IDW Publishing.

IDW puts the Archie Secret of the Ooze adaptation back in print on Tuesday, in its original colours

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