Paul Allor

The thing about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is that once you have, you know, teenage mutant ninja turtles, there's no real reason to not just go all out and start making mutants out of everything. This, at least, is the premise of Mutanimals, a team of animal-human hybrids made with the same mutagen that gave us Leo, Mikey, Donnie and Raph, just without the guidance of Splinter --- and listen, I'm as surprised as you are that that sentence actually makes perfect sense. The current version of the Mutanimals were gathered together by Old Hob, the gun-toting one-eyed cat seen above, to form an army to fight Shredder and the Foot Clan, and next week, they're taking the spotlight in their own limited series from Paul Allor and Andy Kuhn, and it all starts with Pigeon Pete having a pretty terrible day.

When Paul Allor's "secret history of Cobra" story was first announced by G.I. Joe comics publisher IDW, I immediately took notice. The idea of a long history for Cobra that would see ninja and pirate versions of Cobra Commander was something so amazing that I was shocked it had never been done before. It turned out, however, that this long history was only a part of what Allor would get to do, moving from that complicated secret history into a lean, thrilling adventure for the G.I Joe team. Now, with Allor's run alongside artists Steve Kurth, Alex Cal, S.L. Gallant, Shawn Lee, Robert Atkins and Chris Evenhuis being collected this week in a paperback called G.I. Joe: Siren Song, we spoke to Allor to find out about how much of Cobra Commander's secret history was true, why he built the story around a mother trying to save her child, and just what it was about Big Boa that needed a comeback.

This might be obvious if you caught last week's installment of Ask Chris, but I've been thinking a lot about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles lately. More than usual, I mean. Because let's be real here, there's nobody who was a kid in the late '80s who doesn't think about how Raphael is cool (but rude) on a fairly regular basis...