Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #19-21

 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #19-21

Originally released in 1989

Written by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird

Art by Jim Lawson

After an extended period of time in a small town, this set of issues starts the Return To New York arc, which is exactly what it sounds like.  While the low-key adventures were nice, it does seem like a return to the Big Apple is overdue, especially since Raphael points out that they've been away from the city for a year. (And Shredder and the Foot Clan have presumably been free to do whatever they want in that time)

Angry at their lack of progress, Raphael storms off to New York City on his own after calling Leonardo a coward.  As the cover indicates, this doesn't go too well for him without his brothers or Splinter to watch his back.

Raphael spends most of the issue being hunted by Foot Ninja throughout the sewers.  He holds up pretty well against them, but it's clear that he's outnumbered and in need of something to even the odds.  By the time that the other three Ninja Turtles catch up to him, he's found it.

This story arc marks something of the end of an era for the comic, as according to the notes after the issue, Eastman and Laird wouldn't work together for another thirty issues or so (in a storyline called "City At War") due to the series taking off and the two of them focusing on the business side of things as the toyline and cartoon had started and the first movie was entering production.

With the help of Zog, a Triceraton who was trapped on Earth and went insane in the atmosphere, the Turtles find a Foot hideout deep within the sewers. Using it, they locate the main base of operations, where they assume the Shredder must be located. Despite his best efforts, Zog isn't the stealthy type, leading to the team being discovered and having to fight their way through the base.

Zog is overwhelmed by the Foot Clan's numbers and ultimately killed by the Shredder. ...or at least a Shredder, as the Turtles encounter three warped duplicates that seemed like failed attempts at cloning the original, with all of them wearing similar armour.

In the fight that breaks out, one of the Shredder duplicates is dismembered, revealing it to be made up of a bunch of worms.  Raphael chases after the real deal on his own, ignoring Leonardo's objections that they should stick together.

Leonardo catches up to Raphael and saves him from an ambush; one of them needs to go back and help Michelangelo and Donatello, and Raph admits that Leonardo is better suited to taking on the Shredder.

When face to face with the Shredder, Leonardo can't help but ask how the Shredder is alive when Leonardo saw him die three years ago.  As a matter of fact, the Shredder did die, but thanks to the Foot Clan's knowledge, they knew of a type of worm that could gather knowledge from what it ate. (I'm not sure if this is the same type of bug described in an early issue of Alan Moore's Swamp Thing run that was eventually disproven or not) The Foot had the worms eat parts of Shredder's body, and after three failed attempts, the fourth one was a recreation of Oroku Saki with all of his knowledge, memories, and hatred, just made out of worms.

It's a bit of an odd plot point, to be sure, but Shredder's death in the original comic was pretty definitive.  Though with alien technologies involved in these first twenty-one issues, cloning seems like it would have been a simpler explanation for the Shredder's return.

The fight takes them onto the roof as Raphael saved Donatello and Michelangelo with a rocket launcher. The explosion damages a crucial part of the infrastructure, causing the whole thing to collapse.

In all of the chaos, the art gets messy at points, but the final double page spread of the Turtles giving the Shredder's decapitated body (or at least the worms that make it up) a Viking funeral (presumably to make sure that he doesn't come back) is great. It seems to definitively close the book on any further returns of the Shredder (by my understanding, this is his last appearance in this continuity, though I could be wrong), and it's a somber way to conclude this story arc.