The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are back, though they never really left. In 2024, after publishing the longest-running Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic book in the franchise’s 40-year history, IDW Publishing relaunched its ongoing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series with a new first issue, and Jason Aaron, who has built up a strong fanbase with his work at Marvel on such titles as Star Wars and Avengers, taking over as writer. The first four issues of the new series saw Aaron teaming with high-profile artists for stories focused on each of the Turtles individually, the once close brothers having all gone their separate ways after some as-of-yet unexplained falling out.
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As of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #6, which will be released later this month, the gang is all back together. The unexpected reemergence of the Foot Clan forces the brothers to seek each other out and return to New York City, which has fallen under the Foot’s control. Aaron says this turn of events, with the Turtles’ longtime home turning against them, is part of a maturing of Turtles.
“I’ve looked at a lot of this story as a dad who’s the father of a son who’s 19, so looking at what he’s facing as he’s out of high school and starting to try to make his way in the world, and what I went through at his age,” Aaron tells ComicBook. “That’s how I’m looking at these guys, the Turtles. They’re still the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but they’re not 13. They’ve been through a lot over the course of their teens. They’ve grown in huge ways, but most people at that age, you still don’t know entirely who you are, and you have a lot of growing to do, and some of that is as you go out into the world, you suddenly find it a little less simple and idyllic as it was when you were growing up.”
Aaron relating the Turtles to his family touches on the core of the TMNT and what sets them apart from an increasingly competitive comics market where modernized takes on nostalgic characters are becoming more common. There’s a distinct family dynamic between the four brothers — Leonarardo, Michelangelo, Donatello, and Raphael — that’s different even from the atomic family structure of a team like the Fantastic Four or the found family theme present in comics involving the X-Men and others.
“It’s a book about brothers, about siblings,” Aaron stresses. He relates his own life growing up with siblings, albeit ones that were older than him to the point that he almost grew up like an “only child.” And yet, “I was old enough to be aware enough and realize how often they fought with each other,” he says. “I think that love-hate relationship between siblings… we’re stretching that to its limits.”
“These are four brothers, they’re orphans, they are teenagers, they are going through it as teenagers do,” adds Andy Khouri, the recently hired new Senior Editor of IDW’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles line. “I think that’s distinct from the loner characters of [DC’s] Absolute line or even the nuclear family dynamic you see in Ultimate Spider-Man or something like that. This is a very fraught sibling relationship that I think a lot of us can relate to, but there’s still a lot of love there. The story’s full of action, and adventure, and mystery, but there’s a core story that Jason is telling about a family trying to heal itself.”
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #6 is also the debut issue for the series’ new regular artist, Juan Ferreyra. Ferreyra’s style feels of the same lineage as the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics by creators Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird. Aaron has long said those gritty original comics are the touchstone for his run on the series.
“Juan has blown me away every step of the way,” Aaron says. “I think he’s the perfect guy to do this kind of story.”
Though Khouri didn’t get involved with the series until after Ferrerya was chosen, he’s worked with the artist previously. “I can honestly say that if it had been my job to pick the ongoing artist, he would have been the one I wanted,” he says. “That’s the truth.”
Khouri previously worked at DC Comics, where he edited a wide range of comics for the publisher’s core line (Suicide Squad) and its mature readers imprint, DC Black Label (Wonder Woman: Death Earth), as well as other special projects (Batman ’89) and anthologies (Batman: Black and White). He’s taking a similar approach to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as he took to DC’s stable of superhero characters.
“When you work with these sorts of really big legacy characters that have decades of stories behind them, the real trick is how do you surface the things about those characters that feel the most relevant right now and present it in a thoroughly modern way, almost as if they were created now, while still honoring and acknowledging and building on what came before,” Khouri explains. “In the case of the Turtles, our book is not a reboot, it’s a relaunch of a series that continues a canon that has been running for about 13 years.”
He continues, “Everything that’s happened before still counts, and still matters, and this is a natural evolution of that. That’s the kind of thing I did all the time at DC when you work with older characters that you’re trying to refresh and make hospitable for new readers while still giving the longtime readers things that are surprising and entertaining. It’s really the same job.”
Having worked on Star Wars and many Marvel Comics characters, Aaron is bringing a similar experience to TMNT, describing his job as, “Take these characters who have been around for so long and figure out, what do they mean to me, what do they mean in the present day, and try to encapsulate everything that’s come before but in a way that feels fresh.”
Having worked on characters older than he is at Marvel, Aaron notes that there’s something special about his work on Teenage MUtant NInja Turtles. “With Turtles, I’m looking back to when I was a kid. I was there. I wasn’t around for the Golden Age or the Silver Age, but… with Turtles, I read those books as they were coming out in the 1980s. It is different when you’re looking back to your own personal experience in a bigger way, which makes it, in some sense, more fun that I’m able to reconnect with that kid and what appealed to me about these characters when I was that age, and they were brand-new and I first discovered them.”
But for Aaron, it all ultimately boils down to, “What do I want to read? What speaks to me? I don’t know how to control anything else. I’ve spent 20 years building a career writing comic books for myself, basically. I think that’s the only way to do it well. This has to speak to me, this has to resonate with me. This is the stuff I enjoy about these characters.”
IDW’s decision to relaunch the TMNT line while keeping its long-running continuity bucks a recent trend in comics. Image, Marvel, and DC each recently launched fresh continuities featuring entirely new versions of iconic characters. While IDW’s decision pre-dates his time with the company, Khouri praises the “uncommonly good” run of titles that preceded this new era and feels “There’s more to gain by maintaining the canon than by discarding it” since it gives Aaron a rich history to draw from.
“Jason’s book will be the north star for everything else that we are going to be putting out this year,” Khouri says. “There will be a back-to-basics approach with just about everything you see coming soon, and the attempt will be to do what we described — surface the elements of some of these iconic characters that feel the most compelling right now and make them feel fresh as if they were created today — while not undoing or contradicting or jettisoning anything from their canon at all. Part of the strategy is we’re going to give people a real gripping jumping on point, a real hospitable place, but we also hope to drive them to the backlist as well because It’s an incredible backlist.”
Khouri promises, “There’s going to be something for everybody. We’re going to be doing some stuff that focuses on some of the more fan-favorite IDW characters. We’re going to be doing some stuff that’s not necessarily as grounded as Jason’s stuff. We hope that people will feel that there’s something for every kind of Turtles fan in 2025… Back to basics can mean a lot of different things when you’re talking about the Ninja Turtles.”
While the more than a decade of continuity that preceded this new run remains in place, Aaron is still writing the new series with an eye toward possible newcomers not just to IDW’s comics, but the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles entirely. “I don’t think you can go into any job like this assuming that everybody already knows and loves the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” Aaron says. “Of course, most of your readers do. They’ve experienced these characters in one form or another, whether it’s the comics, the movies, or the cartoons, but you still have to write it for someone who just got out of a cave and has never heard of these characters before, and I have to show them this is what’s cool about them and this is why you want to hang out with these guys.”
As a final note, in recent years, the Turtles have also been involved in several crossovers with characters from other universe at other companies, ranging from the Power Rangers to Naruto to Batman. When asked if he could think of another property that would be perfect for the TMNT to cross paths with, Khouri would only say, “Yes.” When pressed, he teased, “If you’re asking will there be more intercompany crossovers? The answer is yes.”
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #6 goes on sale on January 29th. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #7, which begins a new story arc and IDW bills as a jumping-on point for new readers, has a final order cutoff date of Monday, January 20th.
