Image Comics
(The turtles look like Hulk, don't they? :o)
Image- was passed the turtle torch by Mirage and continued the story starting from their 18th birthday party. Image, from what I gather, had a new look, the turtles looked different, a little worse than the Mirage one's, and the story was darker, and dirtier, but I was amazed that some of the lines that they say while fighting, reminded me intimatly of the movie, although, some of them were more gruesome. Image has also introduced a number of changes, and one very large one, the turtles have almost all undergone damage, Leonardo has lost a hand, Donatello has become a cyborg, and Raphael's face has been burnt by the explosion of a cyborg, and Splinter has died. That is the large one. Splinter was also killed by Raphael, which continues the blow. Splinter's case in Image is something else, however, and so I will stick to the thread-bare story of what little I know, having read one comic, and from what I have been told by others, but I will say that I enjoyed the way they drew Splinter more than I did the turtles, or anything else, and all I can say is- thank goodness Raphael isn't so romance-prone as to gush over that ninja girl! :o) (I've heard the most about romances in fan-fics and stuff with Raphael, but this again, is another story. :o)
Image wasn't entirely all that bad, when I first was waiting to read the comic, I was bearing up a hard core of nitty-gritty anticipation of something that would shock me and startle me, it is amazing what imagination can do. In actual fact, the comic affected me more subtley, as everything, not quite as I had expected. In the first place, I was warey of reading it at all, and when I did, it was mainly out of curiousity and to be able to back up my complaints about what they did to the story line, I had imagined something so much worse, that the fights and the gruesome qualities didn't hit me quite over the head, and I picked out the pannels were the turtles didshow emotion, or the parts were I added the quality everyone has to themselves to make something matter to them. And now Image does matter slightly more to me than I had expected, they handled the turtles personalities better than I had built in my mind, and even now this building up of the ideas inside my head is affecting me, for I think in a little when those images have worn off a little, I will look at them again and see all the stuff I had imagined twice worse over at their normal value, and see the more gruesome sides, and were I would have liked to see a little more emotion. But for now, I will leave it to say that even though fighting cyborgs isn't really my cup of tea, and I probably won't buy another one, although you never know, but I did enjoy this one, and I could probably read it again :o).