The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - or at least what's left of them - will be facing a bleak future in IDW's five-part miniseries Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin when the books roll out this Summer. Taking place in 2040, the storyline is based on an original concept from TMNT co-creators Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird and seems like it will be a return to the comics' darker roots and grant fans a glimpse at the ultimate fates of the Heroes in a Half Shell.
IDW's announcement suggests a re-imagining of the Turtles' version of New York City, and the story has taken a circuitous route to get to readers. Based on a thought to be lost arc conceived of by Eastman and Laird in 1987, the books will present to readers with "a lone surviving Turtle (as he) goes on a seemingly hopeless mission to obtain justice for his fallen family and friends."
The identity of the final surviving turtle remains a mystery, but preview art shows him carrying an arsenal of all of the quartet's signature weapons. Eastman hinted in the press release from IDW that readers can expect a return to the tonal form of the original books - one much darker than the oftentimes almost whimsical adventures casual fans may be more familiar with from the films and cartoons. The story, he said, will hearken back to, "when it was all about the comics, mostly just Peter and I writing and drawing the issues, pre-everything the world would soon come to know about these characters that we’d created and called the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles." The title alone might offer a hint as to what we can expect, as a Ronin, according to Merriam-Webster, is defined as "a vagrant samurai without a master," so it seems like whichever Turtle this is will be entirely on his own.
Eastman will do the book's layouts, while Andy Kuhn will cover the inking with a script from longtime TMNT scribe Tom Waltz. Eastman presented a revised version of his and Laird's manuscript to Waltz a little over a year ago, with it now having been updated to a 2040 setting.
When Kevin first showed me the outline that he and Peter had created back in the ’80s, I was gobsmacked," Waltz said. "Beyond Peter Laird’s eerily prescient technological and sociological predictions, the story idea itself was exciting and versatile, designed in a way that it could be easily modified to fit into the many different TMNT iterations that have existed over the years, without losing any of the core elements injected into it by both Kevin and Peter.
IDW has yet to announce a concrete release date - quite possibly due to the uncertainty of comic book distribution at the moment - but says fans can expect the books this summer. They'll be 48 pages apiece and feature at least two variant covers for the die-hard collectors out there. While it's difficult to cast aspersions on any interpretation of the Turtles, this could prove to be a refreshing look back on the books' and characters' roots and how they may have turned out in the future.
Source: IDW
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