Tear Jerker / Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Mirage)

• Splinter accepting April as his daughter at the end of City at War.
• Splinter's heart attack in volume 4, issue 10, and his funeral in issue 11. Seeing as Splinter was a father to the Turtles, it's completely devastating.
  • Leo's eulogy in the latter issue is both touching and heart-wrenching, capping off with "But we will never forget him—our sensei, our master... our father."
• Cold, Cold Ice is a depressing revenge attempt that humanizes the Foot.
• Gabrielle's death during childbirth. Casey was just starting to re-build his life without the anger and insanity that previously plagued him only to have it shattered in one blow. The silver lining is that he got Shadow out of it.
• Dark Shadows. It's set in a Bad Future with Casey Jones' adopted daughter Shadow as a scarred, hardened warrior on a flooded earth. She seeks out Raphael, her apparent ninjutsu instructor, in an attempt to unleash her rage on him and almost kill him, and Raphael expounds that what ultimately drove the family apart was something SHADOW did to Donatello (it isn't explained what), and she takes out his eye before choosing to spare him. Then it shows that this is all a vision shown to present day Raph by Time Mistress Renet - as the GOOD outcome. If Raphael doesn't train her in ninjutsu and set her down this path, she'll die at the age of 23 at the hands of The Foot. Raph makes the decision to train her.
• Sons of the Silent Age. It takes place shortly after the Shredder's death, with the Turtles feeling restless and aimless, not to mention having the Foot swearing revenge against them, which would continue to haunt them for some time. While on a rafting trip down a river with Casey and April, they encounter a dying fishlike humanoid covered in radiation burns from the nearby nuclear plant, who communicates mentally with April, and reveals that she is the last female of her kind. The other four remaining humanoids, four males, soon show up and fight the Turtles, thinking they are hurting the female, but the fight fizzles out after she dies. The four takes her body back with them to the waters, doomed to extinction. The End.
  • And that's not even mentioning the comparison the story draws between the four remaining humanoids, and the Turtles, both doomed to extinction.
• "The Path", from Volume 2 of Tales. In particular, the shot of Mikey cradling his dying cat in his arms and saying "Goodbye, friend."
  • A flashback shows Splinter having a vision that somehow involves Mikey and death. A conversation ensues about steeling against love and compassion in order to survive. In the present, a ritual can be performed to save Klunk's life and Mikey is prepared to use a stray cat he found. He tries to justify what he's doing by saying, "Nobody loves it"—only to recoil in shame with what he just said, so he has the stray released, even if it means losing his friend. In the end, Splinter admits that Mikey's way of compassion is something he could learn from.

---