Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/Usagi Yojimbo: Wherewhen

I’ve always enjoyed these crossover team-ups between the Rabbit Ronin and the Heroes in a Half Shell.  More so because it feels like they represent two storytelling universes that developed independently of each other, but fit together remarkably well.  Sure, the stories they’ve appeared together in have also been fun, but the best one still remains the time the Turtles showed up in the pages of Usagi’s solo series at the start of its run at Mirage Studios (collected way back in vol. 8 “Shades of Death”).  That’s still true after this one, even as it reveals itself to be more important to the “Usagi” saga than it initially appears.

The story opens with Usagi marching with Lord Noriyuki to what everyone hopes will be the final battle with Lord Hikiji.  Tomoe, Gen, Jotaro, and Yukichi are also onboard and everyone is doing their best to prepare for the battle.  Said preparations are interrupted when Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Donatello show up again in their time.  They’ve come here chasing after a time-traveling villain named Doctor Wherewhen who came from the future in hopes of conquering the past.  

The Doctor has a decent setup for a superhero villain and at first glance provides the obvious reason creator Stan Sakai is writing and illustrating this crossover.  Which would be the chance to allow him to draw lots of robots.  Sakai has said that he likes doing projects aside from regular “Usagi” stories because of the chance they give him to draw stuff he couldn’t normally do in a feudal Japan setting.  So we get some fun mechanical designs here and see Usagi and company fight off a lot of cannon fodder robots as well.

If that sounds like a thin reason to do another crossover story, don’t worry.  That’s because “Wherewhen” also functions as a continuity fix between current “Usagi” stories and “Senso,” the story of Usagi’s final adventure.  As for what it’s fixing… you may have wondered why certain characters weren’t present in that story despite their prominence in the ongoing series.  “Wherewhen” provides the explanation for that.  While it’s good to have one, there’s no denying that the explanations given are more of a downer than anything else.

In fact, aside from the robots and the continuity fixing, there’s not a lot else “Wherewhen” has to offer.  It’s basically a story where a villain who threatens both the Turtles and Usagi shows up and they team up to defeat him.  Don’t expect any real surprises or interesting interactions between the casts of both series, even though the Turtles do get a chance to try out okonomiyaki (a.k.a. “Japanese Pizza”).  Wherewhen himself doesn’t have much more to his character beyond his gimmick with his most memorable moment being a bit of “I can’t believe no-one noticed this” observation via giant robot.

Aside from that bit, the story doesn’t do anything particularly bad in its execution and the artwork is as accomplished as you’d expect from Sakai.  That’s enough to make this passable for someone like me who’s always up for new works from this creator.  Turtles fans, however, will likely come away wondering what the big deal is and why this crossover had to happen in the first place.  They’d be better off picking up the collected edition of the crossover adventures between these characters, and (I certainly hope) the next volume of Usagi’s adventures from Dark Horse coming later this year.