Jon Sommariva

I don't want to be an armchair editor here or anything, but you'd think that if you're doing a story where Batman crosses the dimensional barrier from Gotham City to hang out in New York --- specifically the NYC that's home to the animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles --- you'd have to take a page or two for him to ask questions, right? "Where are all the abandoned warehouses," he asks, scowling, "And why isn't there a single Playing Card And Chemical Factory on the entire island of Manhattan? And why are your sewers so... livable?!"

A while back, I interviewed Matthew K. Manning and I spoke briefly about how he once wrote a young adult novel in the Tony Hawk's 900 Revolution series, which is about a group of radical teens searching for the pieces of Tony Hawk's skateboard, which was shattered with the mystical force of the world's most incredible skateboard trick. And honestly? I thought that was the most jealous that I could be of someone else's writing career. Now, though, Manning has managed to top himself as the writer of Batman/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures, in which the animated versions of both franchises collide in a dimension-hopping adventure. And next week, when the second issue hits, the focus is on the villains as the Joker and Harley Quinn team up with Shredder, Bebop and Rocksteady --- and nothing good will come of this.

This year's Batman/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series was one of the most purely fun comics in a good long while. It was the platonic ideal of a crossover, one that played with the pre-existing ideas of invading dimensions that we've already seen in TMNT, and threw them up against Gotham City's arch-criminals until we got to the perfectly logical conclusion of Mr. Freeze being turned into a mutant polar bear. The thing is, James Tynion IV and Freddie E. Williams did so much with that book that I was really left wondering just what they'd do in a sequel. In retrospect, the answer is obvious: Revive The Batman Adventures, the jaw-droppingly good tie-in to Batman: The Animated Series, and mash it up with the TMNT's own current cartoon universe to see what happens. It looks amazing, and we're revealing the covers and solicitation for the second issue below!

Dark Horse Comics have announced a renewed strategy to expand the number of all-ages graphic novels they publish, with a concentrated push into the market for 2015 with the launch of four new titles: Rexodus, The Courageous Princess, Veda: Assembly Required, and The Return of the Gremlins.