Warning: Spoilers for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #4TheTeenage Mutant Ninja Turtlesare officially reunited, but the new version of Donatello might be surprising for fans of the classic cartoon. The lovable nerd has undergone a startling transformation in the comics, one that will leave him unrecognizable to long-time fans.
Coming from the creative team of Jason Aaron, Chris Burnham, Brian Reber and Shawn Lee,Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles#4 focuses entirely on Donatello. Still recovering from his recent travels through time,Donnie has become a scrawny warrior in a tattered cloak, accentuating his artificial shell.
Just barely holding on to his sanity, Donatello winds up being taken prisoner by an underground fighting ring, where humans pay for the opportunity to fight mutants. Donnie keeps volunteering himself to spare the other captive mutants, showing that he’s still every bit the formidable warrior he always was.
Donatello’s Radical Transformation inTeenage Mutant Ninja Turtles#4 Will Shock Fans
Variant Cover by J. Gonzo
Donnie’s redesign is immediately striking. The spindly limbs sticking out of his massive shell give Donnie an almost insect-like appearance, andthe tattered cloak gives him an almost post-apocalyptic appearancethat wouldn’t be out of placein something like 2000 A.D.or theMad Maxmovies. In spite of his appearance, he’s no less the warrior, as Donnie takes out wave after wave of human opponents. Donnie also takes on an army of Foot ninja immediately afterward, defeating them all single-handedly.
This isn’t the first radical transformation Donnie’s gone through, as he received a cyborg body during the Image ComicsTurtlesrun in the 1990s,
SeeingDonatello reduced to such a stateis heartbreaking, but the lone Ninja Turtle shows off howhe’s still a hero even without his brothers by participating in each cage fight to save his fellow mutants. Donnie also works to free all the mutants behind the scenes, devising a plan while he puts his body on the line in cage fight after cage fight. He does all of this while struggling to hold on to his sanity, to the point where the other mutants in the fighting ring become more worried about Donnie’s state than anything else.
How Will Donatello’s Transformation Affect the TMNT Moving Forward?
Jason Aaron’s Critically-Acclaimed Run Continues
TheTMNT are all reunitedat the end ofTeenage Mutant Ninja Turtles#4, but his brothers are more worried about Donnie’s current state than they are happy to be reunited. Donnie is also convinced that a random rat he encountered on the road is the reincarnation of the deceased Splinter. Keeping the rat on his shoulder even after it is killed by a random throwing star, Donnie remains convinced that he hears Splinter’s voice coming from it. How much Donnie’s current state affects theTeenage Mutant Ninja Turtlesmoving forward remains to be seen, but it remains a radical transformation nonetheless.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT) is a multi-media franchise that began with Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s comics in the 1980s. Throughout the years, their comic books expanded to movies, TV shows, video games, and toys. Most notably, the animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ran for nearly a decade and has become a nostalgic staple of the ‘80s and ‘90s. Several other movies have featured the four anthropomorphic turtle brothers (Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello, and Raphael), including the trilogy of live-action films in the ‘90s and the more recent movies Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and its sequel Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows.
