TMNT: The Last Ronin (2022) by Kevin Eastman, Peter Laird, Tom Waltz, Esau, and Isaac Escorza

This book is smoking hot. It came out in 2021 and wrapped up in 2022 with the collected edition coming out in July 2022. It currently sits in Amazon’s #1 Best Seller in Science Fiction Graphic Novels. The series has an impressive 4.9 customer review rating on Amazon, 4.34 on Goodreads, and an 8.8 Critic Rating on Comic Book Round Up.

It’s great to see fans clamoring for a worthwhile TMNT project…but (truthfully speaking) we all bought into the gimmick and the hype…not much substance to be had here.

While the premise of the last surviving turtle story is compelling, Eastman & Laird joined Waltz in a pretty uninspired except for the gimmick. For me, Tom Waltz is that “kid next door that plays with his toys wrong”. I picked up his stuff back in 2015 leading up to the death of Donatello stunt and hung around for a year waiting to see anything special unfold. That storyline went nowhere and was mediocre at best. I think the team learned from their marketing mistakes back in 2015 and overcompensated with nearly 200 variant covers for the series and an appalling $8.99 cover price on the individual issues.

Without giving any spoilers away, we know from the premise that only one turtle remains. Everyone wanted to join in to see who it was, but (I’m sorry to say) it doesn’t matter who is left. The turtle that remains is written in a way he could be any of the four, it literally doesn’t matter which one. He never takes on any of his individual characteristics throughout all five issues. The character’s essence that we knew never comes into play in the story.

I also had a problem with the premise as it was conceptualized because I felt it exploited a limitation of the medium. We spent an entire issue following our beloved character, seeing him, hearing him speak, reading his thoughts, but we can’t tell him apart from his brothers until it is revealed to us when someone speaks to him by name. Does that make sense to you when you stop to think about it? This approach would have been cumbersome on screen and I don’t think we should give them a pass on the page. At one point it’s later explained that he’s mutated more over the years and obviously weathered but I’m not prepared to give them a pass If they wanted to withhold the reveal in the first issue until the end, they could have skillfully used a silent gimmick throughout the first issue rather than just operate as though they’re indistinguishable for each other. While Eastman & Laird early stuff portrayed them as indistinguishable, Waltz books portray them differently.

Rather than just gripe, how satisfying would it have been as a fan, if we would have gotten a pitch where “what if each turtle was the last surviving turtle?” In other words, what if each of the four turtles got a Last Ronin five issue series. What if you had multiple parallel scenes throughout the story and we got to see each of their four unique personalities affect the outcome? What if there were converging and diverging arcs throughout the five issues. I think that would have made me

In 2017 we already saw a superior grim three episode Nickelodeon cartoon story called “Raphael: The Mutant Apocalypse” set fifty years in the future that was intended to be the original cartoon series finale. The story was released as part of season five and relabeled the Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Final Chapters. There is a wealth more character and payoff in that series than what Eastman, Laird, and Waltz are able to throw together.