As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
The Main Series
- The very first issue ends with Raphael, scavenging for food, stumbling upon Casey Jones' house, where Casey's father is about to beat his son senseless in a drunken rage, screaming all the while about how his son is inherently evil and should never have been born. It's a chilling slice of realistic evil in an otherwise fantastical world of mutants, magic and aliens.
- Raphael smashing through the door to protect Casey is at once awesome and terrifying. As a reader, one knows Raph is here to kick some righteous ass, but from Casey's perspective, a green-skinned inhuman thing has just burst into his home, manifestly looking for a fight.
- In #23 there's the sheer amount of mental torture Leonardo is put through before he winds up joining forces with the Shredder, including seeing a vision of Splinter murdering his brothers, then raising them as killer zombies.
- In #100, we find out that Utroms are apparently parasitic organisms. And since Leatherhead ATE Krang... well... Let's just say we're not done with the General yet.
- Issue #127 is this to the extreme. The previous issues had been building up Dr. Barlow and the mutants he treats, among them the newly debuted Groundchuck and Dirtbag and Venus, in how creepy the whole thing is with making mutants into patchwork creatures in a supposed effort to regain their humanity. This issue ups the ante considerably, especially after we find out that Barlow is attempting to create doppelgangers of the titular turtles, as Alopex sneaks deeper into Barlow's workplace and finds various mutilated corpses and body parts (even including decapitated heads) of mutants, then in a different room finds the results of Barlow's experiments on the doppelgangers, with several mutilated mutant turtles floating in large, liquid-filled tubes, made worse when it's not made clear if they're dead or alive. And to top it all off, the issue ends with our first glimpse at Venus, who is another of Barlow's patchwork creatures, her limbs separated from her body, with the stumps and her eyes glowing in a very unnatural way.
- Also from issue #127 we have Dirtbag himself. Already his redesign for the comic is plenty scary, as instead of a regular mole, here he is a naked mole rat and just the way he looks is nightmarish enough, especially as he has strange tubes coming out of his head and upper back. And then we see what happens when he enters the room of mutilated corpses that Alopex is now hiding in. Despite the fact that Alopex is a trained ninja, Dirtbag finds her in about two seconds and attacks her, is completely unfazed when Alopex stabs him in the head with her sickle and then grabs Alopex and starts savagely biting into her tail. Alopex manages to free herself and runs away, injured and terrified, with Dirtbag silently standing in shadow on the doorway, looking like something straight out of a slasher movie.
Mini-Series/Side Stories
Villains Micro-Series
- Issue #1, which focuses on Krang, ends on a terrifying note as Krang, after seeming to have forgiven his soldier for his instinctive reaction of seeking to help the Utrom from his bath, beckons him closer... only to leap at him and tear out his throat with his teeth for "disrespect".
- Issue #2:
- Baxter's flashbacks to his emotionally abusive father are, ironically, the least creepy part of the issue.
- The reveal of "The Flyborg"; a mutagen-evolved fly converted into a cyborg, which Baxter sells to Krang as an experiment in a superior, completely expendable, worker drone.
- Whilst taking the Flyborg through the Technodrome, it reveals that, rather than being a mindless animal or a computer-controled droid, it's fully cognizant. Baxter simply muses that this was unexpected, before attempting to subdue it with an agonizing electric shock.
- The Flyborg promptly revolts against its creator and tears off its shock collar, before massacring a squad of Rock Warriors. Baxter's mental narration hammers in how completely screwed the Flyborg's opponents are, because the creature was designed to be a Pint-Sized Powerhouse.
- Baxter being hunted through the Technodrome by the Flyborg, including being forced to beg Krang for his life before the Utrom general will show Baxter the route to safety. But, in the end, the Flyborg catches up to its creator...
- Which is when Baxter reveals that the shock collar was just for show, and he had total remote control over the Flyborg's cybernetic body all along. He then reveals how he has exploited the Flyborg's attempt at rebellion to cover up his plans, then "cleans up the loose ends" by making the Flyborg attack a new squad of Rock Warriors and get shot. The kicker is the way that the Flyborg is helplessly pleading for mercy, right up until it is killed mid-sentence.
- If the scene in Issue #3 of Hob mutating from lost stray to humanoid cat, which his own narration describes as agonizingly painful, isn't scary enough, then the scenes of his torturous "testing" in Baxter's lab should give you your money's worth.
- The "adoption ritual" of the Foot Clan, which is revealed in Issue #4; the initiate must kill their entire family to prove their loyalty to the Foot. Allopex is deliberately sent back to the Arctic forest where she was born precisely to trigger her memories of her pre-mutation life, just so the Shredder burning that forest down will mean something to her. It's ugly, it's cruel, and it's completely meaningless, because prior to that moment, Allopex was already totally loyal to Shredder.
- Issue #7, which is chronologically our first look at Bebop & Rocksteady in this continuity, makes them terrifying.
- Half a dozen Triad thugs open fire on the two newly fledged mutants, riddling them with bullets, and all it does is piss them off. Cue the twin Nightmare Faces; Bebop with blank, white, staring eye gleaming over his massive tusk, whilst Rocksteady's face is almost completely covered in shadow, exposing only his horn, fangs, and a single hellish red dot of an eye.
- Karai sends a full swarm of Foot ninjas to kill Bebop and Rocksteady for their incompetence, and the mutants fight back. The result is a massacre; the mutants are stabbed, slashed, and cut to pieces without even feeling it, whilst they tear their human opponents apart with their bare hands. Rocksteady bites one guy's arm off, whilst Bebop crushes another guy's skull in one hand.
- The penultimate panel of the fight scene is just a panel of Bebop's squealing face rendered entirely in red and black.
- Once the fight is over, Bebop and Rocksteady are the last two standing in a pile of bodies. Their fists are covered in blood, and various bladed weapons are impaling them, which they don't even seem to feel.
- Issue #8 piles on the existential dread with the reveal of Shredder's fate; to annihilate the world, repopulate it with mutants and barbarians, and ultimately to conquer it himself... then to die of old age and go to the afterlife, where he will "enjoy" a timeless limbo clinging desperately to his sanity before his younger self will arrive and strike him down, condemning him to a eternity as an empty spiritual husk, like the rest of the dead.
