Team Spotlight: Gang of Four

The current run of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics by IDW is trying to more or less be the definitive TMNT story by synthesizing all the Ninja Turtles media that came before it. As such, that means it has had a ton of canon immigrants and will continue to have many more.

This week: the Gang of Four!

This is an exciting one because they're actually a DOUBLE canon immigrant. The Gang of Four as they originally appeared are a group of cyborgs named Waster, Fist, Lynch, and Dead Eye that work for Null. Specifically, they're reanimated corpses augmented with mechanical parts. They first appeared in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures #48 (September 1993), but three of them were created for a Mutanimals animated series that never happened, although they had different names. Waster was called Executor:

Lynch was called Gunskull:

And Deadeye was called Guzzler:

They're pretty silly characters, but they are notable for one thing: killing the Mutanimals.

Which makes it pretty ominous that they - or a version of them - appeared in a Mutanimals-focused story in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Universe #11 (June 2017).

As you can see, they're quite different. Although they have the same names (although Deadeye has been renamed Dead Aim) - and in fact that's the only way we know they're the same characters since they don't call themselves the Gang of Four - they are now cyborg werewolves. But they still work for Null.