Booyakasha Books Volume Two is out at $17.95, and the last of the Panini strips comes with it

Everyone who grew up on the 2012 series has seen the episodes. The comics are another matter.

While the show was on the air, Panini ran a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles magazine in Britain that reached fifty-nine issues, and every one of them carried an original Turtles strip. They were drawn and written by British comics people working to a monthly magazine deadline rather than to a cartoon’s production schedule, but IDW’s own copy says that the majority of those strips have never been published in the United States.

IDW has spent this year fixing that, and this week the job is finished. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Booyakasha Books, Vol. 2 is a full colour softcover of 328 pages, under a cover by Iain Buchanan. It collects the strips from issues 32 through 59, and Amazon’s listing dates it 20 October. [1] Volume one arrived in April carrying the first half of the run, so the whole magazine is now in print between the two books.

Which makes these strips the last corner of the 2012 series that an American reader has had no way to get at.

IDW’s own product page carries four preview spreads, and all four come from the opening story, “Tag Trouble!” The credit line sits at the foot of page four: script by Alec Worley, art by Iain Buchanan, colours by Kat Nicholson and Jason Cardy with a colour assist from R Hogan, and letters by Alex Foot. [2] It opens with Splinter handing Michelangelo a can of spray paint. Donatello objects, on the reasonable grounds that the last time Mikey was given spray paint he used it as a pizza topping. Splinter’s answer is that an artistic exercise will teach the boy to concentrate, and that it will keep him out of the refrigerator and away from the cheesicles. Then the Purple Dragons turn up, moving crates for Shredder and tagging the city with a nanobot spray paint that animates whatever it has been sprayed into the moment it detects an intruder, and Mikey has been painting with cans he found on the same street.

The one story IDW has previewed keeps to a simple pattern: a daft premise, the cast sounding as they did on television, and a scrap at the end. These are twelve pages at a time, written for a monthly magazine’s readers rather than for a collected edition, so they are not trying to be the IDW ongoing. But “Tag Trouble!” spends its opening pages on Mikey’s spray cans and Splinter’s lecture about concentration, and those same cans are what the Purple Dragons’ nanobot paint turns against the Turtles later on.

Getting hold of a copy is the awkward part, and our own entry for volume one points at the one shop that cannot sell you volume two. BigBadToyStore, where our entry for volume one sends people, lists volume two at the full $24.99 cover price, but it cannot actually sell you one; the page offers a waitlist and nothing else. [3] MyComicShop has it in Near Mint at $17.95 with a live add to cart, and a Fine copy at $10.75 sitting beside it, on the same series page that already carries volume one at $17.95. IDW’s own shop sells it direct at $17.99, and Amazon has the paperback in stock at $24.99 with a Kindle edition at $14.99.

Volume one has been easy to find since April. With this one beside it, the strips Panini ran across fifty-nine issues are in print in America, most of them for the first time.

[1] Our catalogue note for volume one records that its bookseller date ran one day ahead of the date comic shops could sell it, so the same gap probably applies to this one. Treat 20 October as the bookshop date rather than the shelf date at your local shop.

[2] Buchanan drew the cover as well as the opening strip.

[3] BigBadToyStore item 196873, read on 21 October. Volume one, item 183394, is in stock there at $24.99 with a live add to cart, so the waitlist is on the new book only.

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Sources: IDW Publishing, Booyakasha Books Vol. 2, Graphic Policy preview, MyComicShop series listing, BigBadToyStore, Amazon. Cover and interior pages: IDW Publishing.

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