It speaks to the mysterious nature of character creation that often times the best villains are the ones created almost on accident, meant to cause problems for the hero for a single story and then go away forever.

That was certainly the case for The Joker, who was meant to die off after his first encounter with Batman, but was immediately brought back and has since become probably the best and best-known comic book villain of them all.

And it was also the case for The Shredder, the blade-covered ninja who was killed off in Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s gritty, goofy parody of Frank Miller’s Daredevil. He was somewhat slow at returning to the comics, turning up for an issue three years later, and again two years after that, but only to get killed off again.

He was much longer lived in the immensely popular cartoon show. And the Archie comics inspired by the success of the cartoon show. And the live action movies. And the other cartoon shows.

Those telling turtle tales since have struggled with the fact that the Shredder was never meant to be, as Laird said in interviews around the time of the last movie, the Darth Vader of the turtles’ world. For the most part, new archenemies tend to at least be colored by The Shredder, as one of the villains in the Shredder-less, 2007 animated movie was.

Which brings us to Tales of the TMNT #56 (Mirage Publishing), the latest issue of the current volume of ninja turtle comics, which offers the latest attempt to come up with a new Shredder who isn’t actually The Shredder.

Like Karai, this fellow falls into the shadow of The Shredder. He’s apparently a member of The Purple Dragons, the street gang that the turtles fought in their first appearance (and that worked for The Foot Clan), and he even mentions Shredder, as in “I expected more…from the ones that killed the Shredder.” And, in the continuity that spawned him (the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon series that launched in 2003 and is still going) he was one of The Shredder’s henchmen.

If you’re familiar with the show, then it’s this guy:

His name is Hun, which, like the name Shredder, pretty much let’s you know right off the bat that he’s a bad guy.

In TMNT #56, writer Tristan Jones and artist Paul Harmon attempt to fold him into the comic book continuity, giving their heroes someone new to knock around and get knocked around by.

As archvillains go, he’s not all that striking visually. That is, he’s not covered in knives, or a wizard goat man, or an evil cartoon brain living the stomach of a fat, bald android. Rather he’s just a big, huge muscley guy with short-cropped hair, a penchant for tank top undershirts and some serious ink—one of his arms is covered in a snake or dragon tattoo that, in black and white, makes it look a little like he has a very-toned snake for his arm.

What Jones has done to make him more striking, however, is closely tie him in to the past history of Casey Jones (no relation to Tristan…at least that I know of). What their relationship is exactly isn’t completely divulged in these 30 pages (the conflict kicked off here will be resolved in a later issue), but the issue opens with Hun beating on a teenage Casey Jones while talking about Casey’s dad, before young Casey sticks a knife in Hun a coupla times.

Fast forward to the present, and Hun has just left prison and is going about getting back to a life of organized crime. April, meanwhile, discovered some old clippings and medical records of Casey’s which lead to a rare fight between the two—apparently teenage Casey was very, very badly hurt by Hun back in the day, resulting in some pretty bad head injuries (And maybe it was just my reading, but there seemed to be some suggestion that maybe the reason Casey Jones has been such a nut in the past is because of some of that damage to his head).

Now that Casey’s grown up into a crime-fighting vigilante and Hun is now a criminal figure again, their paths crossing becomes inevitable, and so they do. While Hun’s no ninja covered in knives, he does manage to fight off four mutant ninja turtles in what amounts to a tie of a battle.

All in all, it’s a pretty interesting tack to take with the character, giving the turtles an enemy to fight in a conflict hat’s quite personal, but only because of their friendship/familial relationship with Casey and April. And, his size and maybe strength aside, Hun is a more realistic sort of villain that most of the recurring ones these heroes have tangled with.

In fact, remove the scenes of humanoid turtles (which are actually pretty few anyway; this is a Casey Jones story more than anything) and this could be a pretty straightforward crime drama.

Harmon’s black and white art is appropriately realistic, with even the more fantastic characters like Hun and the turtles fitting in to the world with the proper weight and gravity, and full of a rainbow of gray tones. He also excels at facial expressions and “acting” through his characters, which grounds the melodrama of the situations enough to keep the accent on the drama throughout.

Based on these thirty pages alone, I don’t think this Hun character will end up being the new Shredder of the Mirage comics or anything, but that’s a rather ambitious goal for any adversary, isn’t it? They can’t all be The Joker after all; Batman needs his Ra’s Al Ghuls and Mr. Zsaszs too.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 8th, 2009 at 5:27 pm and is filed under Caleb's reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.