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"Have You Heard of The Teenage Mutant Challengers?"

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* * * MAJOR SPOILERS: CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN MUST DIE, and TMNT VOL 4 * * * When I was a kid I wanted to be a paleontologist. Then an archaeologist. Then a detective. There's something wonderful about finding things that have been hidden away - about lost origins, clues hidden in plain sight, and cities built on top of other cities. "The Challengers of The Unknown" is one of those cities. It was a wildly popular Jack Kirby creation of the late 1950s and 1960s - a series that seems all but forgotten today, relegated to in-jokes on "Teen Titans Go!" about dusty, old-fashioned, out-of-touch comic franchises. It's been so ignored in the Internet Age that my hour-long web search for detailed reviews, undertaken earlier this year, yielded only one result.  That review , by Win Wiacek of "Now Read This," explains that the Challengers of the Unknown (aka “Challengers,” or “Challs”) were four unrelated men who almost died in a plane crash en...
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The Case For Donnie And April

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 I know this can be a contentious subject, and I'll cheerfully accept the contempt which is sometimes bestowed upon that species of fan, The Shipper , saving any thoughts about the label and the contempt for some other day. The fact is, in any and every iteration, I think it's pretty likely that Donatello will fall in love with April at some point, and that (dependent on circumstances, temperaments, and - obviously - relative ages) every once in a while he might have a chance. The metatext doesn't lie. As far as I know, the 2012 show was the first version to explicitly address the idea that our resident TMNT polymath , a character who loves Shakespeare and/or Greek mythology , and gets excited over fractals and Dewey decimal and quantum processors , might actually be quite taken with the brave, intelligent young woman who becomes the Turtles' ally. I appreciated the 2012 take... it was so horribly, painfully, realistically awkward. Donnie had so much growing up to...
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