The comic book world was shocked and pleasantly surprised when IDW Publishing announced Jason Aaron as the writer of the relaunched Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ongoing series. Aaron was coming off a heralded run at Marvel, but was making time in his schedule to take on other projects. Nobody guessed that included the Heroes in a Half-Shell, but the reception from fans has been nothing but positive. As we march towards Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #12, we’ll soon have to say goodbye to Aaron, who will be wrapping up his run with artist Juan Ferreyra. But before that time comes, Aaron has a lot more drama to put the Turtles through.
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Jason Aaron spoke with ComicBook ahead of the announcement that writer Gene Luen Yang and artist Freddie E. Williams II will be the new creative team on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, to find out everything that Aaron has planned for his final issues. Aaron spoke about the run overall, his many artistic collaborators, pitting the Turtles against the evil district attorney Hale, fracturing the relationship between the Turtles, the mystery surrounding their deceased father, Splinter, the Trial of the Turtles, and much more.
ComicBook: As we sit here a year into your TMNT run, how does it feel to be nearing the finish line?
Jason Aaron: You know, it feels good. It’s been a long road, right? I first agreed to do this a long time ago, and going through the process of the pitch and seeing everything coming together. The fact that there were so many different artists involved in the book has made it feel kind of bigger and longer than even 12 issues.
At the end of the day, once those 12 issues are done and you look back over them, what an incredible murderer’s row of artists that IDW was able to line up. I said many times when that first arc was coming out, I felt like Scrooge McDuck swimming around in the money bin full of riches. Getting to work with Jöelle Jones, Cliff Chiang, and everybody who is a part of those first six issues.
And then getting to top that off with Juan Ferreyra, who came on and I think has been, despite having such a tough act to follow with all those incredible artists, he’s if anything has kind of taken it up a notch and really solidified the tone and the themes of the book and has been doing some of the most incredible action sequences I’ve ever seen in any comic I’ve done in 25 years.
Things obviously change from what’s in the initial plot to what makes the finished product, but did you find yourself having to make many changes once the comic started running?
It was pretty close to the original outline that I did, that fleshed out those first six issues in pretty good detail. Everything after that was a little bit more loose, but it was always about those first six issues being about getting the band back together, seeing the different directions the Turtles had gone in, bringing them back together, introducing this new villain who’s the newly elected DA of Manhattan, having the Turtles return to New York, and then from there kind of seeing how they’re still splintered and how they’re still fighting four different fights, which is pulling them apart and getting them constantly dragged through the mud through the streets of New York.
And then that was going to lead to the Trial of the Turtles, which is the point we’re still at now. So, yeah, that was always the plan. I think the trade and the hardcover, those first six issues just came out, and I don’t know if it’s in the backmatter for both of them, but in the hardcover at least, it’s got my original outline included for those first six issues. One of the major things that changed, which was something I changed, was the Donatello issue, which was originally going to be more like a kind of circus freak show story and turned into this sort of backwoods illegal caged safari that you saw in the preview issue and then in issue four.
But that was something I changed myself just as the story went along. That appealed more to me than my original idea.
I’m glad you brought up D.A. Hale because I liked his introduction. You see these four brothers who are ninjas and they fight the Foot Clan. So obviously folks want to see them face a physical opponent, but then here you have this politician, or someone elected to this new office, who’s turned this entire city against the Turtles. Can you go a little bit into the creation of that character and how you came to decide on having him be the main antagonist?
I liked the idea of returning to the roots of the Turtles as a part of the 40th anniversary. And that meant returning to that original Mirage Studios book, which I loved as a kid. To me, those are the Turtles before everything that’s come since. It was that original, grim and gritty black and white series, so steeped in ’80s action movies and Frank Miller comics. I ate that up.
So I very much wanted to go back to that, going back to New York, which had a lot of different meanings over the course of the book. And I liked seeing the Turtles having grown up a little bit and kind of grown apart in some ways, and see that the city has changed, and they’ve changed, and the relationship to it has changed. And so I wanted a character who could come in and kind of weaponize New York against the Turtles. I liked the idea of that being the district attorney who is still connected to the Foot Clan, and using the Foot Clan as his minions.
But it’s the Turtles fighting a kind of fight they’ve never had to fight before; they’re trying to protect a city that seems to despise them, or they’re being villainized. Having the focus be this new character, that left Karai, the real leader of the Foot Clan, to go off and deal with something else. She’s been tinkering, we’ve gotten teases of it here and there, and you’ll get another one in the next issue, and issue 12 is the big revelation of what she’s been doing all this time.
Another mystery you’ve introduced is the dead rat and its connection to Splinter. It begins with the Turtles being non-believers, and then slowly, starting with Donatello, and then the others start to slowly come around, wondering if this is their deceased father? Can you talk a little bit about setting that mystery up and where it may be heading?
A big part of those first six issues was just seeing the state that Donatello was in, where he’s in a pretty dark place after everything he’d been through at the end of Tom Waltz and Sophie Campbell’s run with the previous volume.
He was pretty broken mentally and physically, and spiritually in every way. Also, he was going through this horrific situation, in that safari fight club that he was locked up in, in Florida, having to fight to protect all these other mutants day after day after day. So I liked him being in such a dark, low place, and him being our entry point in that preview issue. Part of that was him talking to this rat that he’s convinced is Splinter.
This rat’s kind of helping remind him of who he is, and that rat pops up again and again as kind of his guardian or guide throughout the story. Then pretty quickly the rat’s dead, but the rat stays around. And I love the image of these four brothers coming together again and feeling like they’ve sort of emerged from four very different kinds of cocoonsm and they don’t really know who they are in relation to each other anymore, and they’re all looking at Donnie like he’s crazy.
He looks like hell. And he’s got a dead rat on his shoulder that he’s talking to. That to me, kind of that whole dynamic, really summed up the tone and feel of what I wanted for these 12 issues. So then you get to issue six and we realize at the end of that, that it’s being narrated by Splinter and since then there have been strange things happening with rats around New York City, and it’s unclear how it all fits together and what it all means. But you will get answers to those questions in issue 12.
You’re juggling a lot of plot points, from the Turtles reuniting, the mystery behind Splinter that we just talked about, what’s going on with Karai and Hale and this new power that he seems to have. How do you balance giving each story enough attention while also making sure all the threads connect together?
I mean, that’s the job, right? That’s why it always helps to have an outline, and to kind of know where things are headed. I’m an old school comic book fan, so I still read everything in single issues, and I want each single issue I buy to feel like a satisfying chunk of story in and of itself, even when it’s a part of a bigger narrative. So, you want each issue to have as many cool beats and bits of dialogue and action scenes and cool visuals as you can cram in there. You want each issue to feel like it progresses the story in a significant, meaningful way. And then those just build on top of each other, and that’s really been the structure of these 12 issues has been pretty easy and simple.
Again, the plan was always as soon as I had thoughts of pitching for this, of coming on board, I knew I wanted to do those individual issues at the beginning focusing on the different Turtles and kind of set up that broken dynamic, and from there it was pretty easy to break it all down and plot it all. These issues, 10 through 12, still have a lot of big beats packed in there.
We’re in the middle of the Turtles on Trial, which has a lot of fun stuff in it. Some of it’s another nod to the kind of Daredevil roots of the Turtles by plopping them in a courtroom and watching Donnie try to be the one who defends them. And so far, that seems to be going really badly. And they’re facing Hale in his arena. This is where he’s the guy with superpowers, of what he can do in the courtroom, and everything seems to be stacked against him. We’ll have to wait for issue 11 to see how that resolves and how the Turtles can possibly get out of that. And then there’ll be, as you can expect, some big fights at the end, but you’ll have to wait and see who it is they’re fighting.
The big reveal in issue 10 was the cliffhanger with April O’Neill putting on Casey Jones’s mask and wielding his hockey stick. Where is April’s head at right now, as she’s been on the sidelines but slowly has gained more prominence in the story? So, what’s her head like now as she’s watched the city turn against the people that she cares about?
Some of it is that she just doesn’t want to be on the sidelines, right? She wants to be a very active part of this fight and of helping her friends. And I think she was seeing what had happened to Casey, of him getting gunned down by Hale and winding up in the hospital. She’s trained with Casey over the years. She’s been around the Turtles a long time. She’s been on a lot of different adventures herself. April felt like she needed to pick up that mask and hockey stick and step forward and go out into the streets and actually do something to try to solve this.
And that’s what she’s doing these next couple of issues. April is a very active participant in everything that’s going down.
So, with two issues to go, we have the Turtles with their backs against the wall. It’s one thing to fight the Foot Clan, but it’s another to fight public perception and how the city thinks about them. What questions can fans expect to have answered as we head into the big finale?
Well, I think you can expect to have pretty much all of your questions answered, except maybe one. But I don’t know if I’ll tell you. Well, sure. I’ll go ahead and say one of the big questions of the story has been what happened between the brothers? Why did things fall apart? Why did they go their separate ways? And we’ve kind of seen multiple times over the course of these 12 issues that they can’t agree on what that was. They each have different versions of those events of what happened, what drove them apart.
That’s the answer to that question. I would say that question has been answered as much as it’s going to be answered.
One final thing: I just wanted to give you the floor to share whatever comments you wanted to leave with the fans who’ve been enjoying your work so far.
Just that I’ve appreciated the response to this run. It’s been really phenomenal. The sales out of the gate were incredible. Of my two-plus decades in comics. I feel like this is probably the best-reviewed series I’ve ever been a part of. Fans seem like they’ve really embraced the tone and the feel of this story, what we’ve been doing, and especially Juan’s work on these recent issues. So, it’s been incredibly gratifying.
It’s always interesting when you jump around to different audiences within comics. You know, I was at Marvel for a long time, and now I’m doing DC stuff and jumping over into Turtles. There are tons of people who just read Turtles. I remember seeing a comment when I first got announced as the new writer on Turtles, somebody saying, “Uh, cool, that’s exciting. What has this guy written?” So it’s great when you can expose yourself to another part of the audience that’s not familiar with your work. And I’ve been very proud of the work that everybody has done on this book.
Going back to Jöelle Jones, Cliff Chiang, Chris Burnham, Rafael Albuquerque, Darick Robertson, and everybody who’s a part of those first five issues. And then like I said, Juan Ferreyra has just been a revelation with everything he’s done. Hopefully, we stick the landing and people will appreciate, once we get to the end, being able to look back and see really what this story was about and what kind of story we were trying to tell about these characters.
Are you excited to see how Jason Aaron concludes his run on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!
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