Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/Usagi Yojimbo: WhereWhen #1 Review: An Enchanting Adventure Through Time

Sometimes, when picking up a comic book (or any narrative medium), all a reader is looking for is an adventure, and joyful adventure is exactly what's advertised by Stan Sakai and Emi Fujii's cover for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/Usagi Yojimbo: WhereWhen #1, with its heroes' smiling faces looking out to the edges of in search of what's next. For nearly 40 years, there's been hardly a better place to fulfill that craving than in the pages of one of Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo comics, where he's chronicled the adventures of the book's eponymous wandering ronin. Usagi Yojimbo's debut was part of a self-publishing boom in comics in the 1980s. Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is the biggest success story of that era. Thanks to the shared respect and friendship between these creators, these anthropomorphic purveyors of the martial arts have shared a handful of adventures over the years, but Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/Usagi Yojimbo: WhereWhen is their longest and, judging by the first issue, most satisfying adventure yet.

Sakai writes, draws, and letters this crossover, as he has every issue of Usagi Yojimbo, with Hi-Fi coloring the comic book. The story opens with Usagi marching alongside a war party led by Lord Noriyuki. It's an atypical opening to a story about a lone ronin, adding a sense of scale in what's poised to be an unusual chapter in Usagi's story – one involving time travel and mutants from Usagi's future.

A group of local villagers stopping Usagi and asking for his help in dealing with a kappa, a turtle-like kami (spirit) from Japanese folklore that's been killing their people, foreshadows the Turtles' involvement in the story. The inevitable misunderstanding that leads to a clash of heroes followed by reconciliation and joining of forces is easy to see coming but the farmers' request also draws out Usagi's conflicting loyalties, a tension between his duties to his new lord and the commoners he's served and lived among as a ronin.

The hallmarks of Sakai's storytelling style are all here. His lines are thick, fluid, and purposeful, his dialogue is sparse and to the point, and his characters are effusive in their facial expressions, with body language that says everything left out of the verbiage. Usagi and Tomoe, a compatriot whom Usagi carries a torch for despite her politically-motivated marriage, encounter the kappa and dispatch it in a three-panel page that's succinctly emblematic of Sakai's signature knack for graceful swordplay.

It contrasts starkly against the chaos of the Ninja Turtles' battle against the villain WhereWhen and his robot minions. Sakai bifurcates this introductory issue, putting Usagi's story up front and introducing the Turtles in the second half. The Turtles' introduction mirrors Usagi's, with Sakai's use of near-identical layouts drawing a parallel between Usagi's place in Noriyuki's army and the tight-knit and comparatively small Turtle family. Their fighting styles compare differently, the simple three-panel page of Usagi and Tomoe slaying the kappa giving way to the intentionally cluttered and chaotic splash page of the Turtles going to work on WhereWhen's machines. Both are entrancing, speaking to Sakai's artistic versatility.

Sakai is a master of black-and-white comics, but Hi-Fi's colors are a particularly welcome enhancement in this story. Not only does color make it easier to tell the Turtles apart by their masks, but provides an avenue for emphasizing how different the era the Turtles hail from is from Usagi's, with the glow of artificial light bleeding through windows into the black alleyway shadows as the Turtle peek out of a sewer cover below. That's not to imply that Hi-Fi's work is wasted on the feudal setting as the lightly shaded flats don't overcomplicate Sakai's straightforward linework, and the soft green of the grass and blue of the sky brings out the natural beauty of Usagi's era, before the urban sprawl of the Turtles' day.

While this issue doesn't see the Turtles and Usagi meeting yet, it does everything right to set the stage. There's action, compelling characters, and beautiful artwork, combining to synthesize that ephemeral sense of adventure readers look for from both Usagi and the Turtles, making it satisfying to read even apart from what follows. Sakai is a master at work, bringing together a perfect pairing of characters, and the issue makes clear that readers are in for an excellently executed adventure. There are thematic underpinnings here that give the story some substance—loyalty, conquest, romance—and strengthen the issue's action-forward main thrust. As the weather warms up, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/Usagi Yojimbo: WhereWhen #1 may be the perfect comic for readers to lose themselves in after finding a shady outdoor spot.

Published by IDW Publishing

On April 12, 2023

Written by Stan Sakai

Art by Stan Sakai

Colors by Hi-Fi

Letters by Stan Sakai

Cover by Stan Sakai and Emi Fujii