Teenage ninja team up to take down a common foe.

Though they’re often just called the “Ninja Turtles” for the sake of brevity, the full name of the American comic/cartoon heroes in a half-shell is the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. That means there’s a 50-percent overlap for the keyword characteristics of TMNT and the baseline concept of ninja-training teen manga/anime saga Naruto.

So now the time has come for these under-20s shinobi to team up, with the announcement of an official Teenage Mutant Nina Turtles/Naruto crossover comic series.

▼ Click on the right arrow to see more of the cast, including Sakura, Sasuke, April, and Splinter.

IDW Publishing, the Turtles’ comic book home these days, will be publishing the crossover, which will be called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles x Naruto, as IDW realizes that when you have two franchises with such massive fan bases coming together, it’s not the time for obfuscating wordplay in the title. Interestingly, there doesn’t seem to be any sort of interdimensional portal, time-travel mechanism, or any of the other stock plot devices for how one franchise’s characters got to the other’s setting. Instead, it sounds like within this continuity, the Turtles and Naruto just happen to have always been living in the same world, as IDW describes the initial plot with:

“When teenage reporter April O’Neil has a clandestine meeting with Tsunade, the leader of the Hidden Leaf Village, it garners the attention of Naruto, Sasuke, Sakura, and Kakashi. They aren’t the only ones who are wondering what the two women were discussing, though. The sinister Foot Clan have their own interest in April’s visit, as they think she might hold the valuable information on mutation research being conducted by the scientist Baxter Stockman. With April caught between the forces of the Hidden Leaf Village and the Foot Clan, it can’t be long before the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles show up to lend her a hand!.”

Neither Naruto creator/manga artist Masashi Kishimoto, nor successor series Boruto’s artist Mikio Ikemoto appear to be involved. However, as the above tweet shows, there’s plenty of passion from Jorge Jiménez, who’s contributing cover artwork and collaborating with up with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles x Naruto’s primary illustrator Hendry Prasetya and writer Caleb Goellner for the four-issue crossover series which is being published by San Diego-based IDW with cooperation from Viz Media, Naruto’s North American publisher.

An official release date for the first issue of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles x Naruto is yet to be announced, but IDW’s Instagram post includes the message “Pre-order by September 30 at your local comic shop,” so it looks like the ninja will be meeting each other sometime this coming fall.

Source: Instagram/@tmnt, IGN 
Top image: Instagram/@tmnt
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