TMNT: THE LAST RONIN Review

This book has been smoking hot. It came out in 2021 and wrapped up in 2022 with the collected edition coming out in July 2022. Until recently, it sat #1 on the Amazon Best-Seller list for 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.

I’m a huge turtles fan and 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 uninspiring jaunt. For me, Tom Waltz is that “kid next door that plays with his toys wrong”. I picked up the first collected volume of his 2011 series and then jumped on again back in 2015 leading up to the death of Donatello stunt. I hung around for a while waiting to see anything special unfold but that storyline went nowhere and was (at best) mediocre. IDW failed to capitalize on the death event, selling less than 15K copies and settling for #146 on the sales chart. I think the team learned from their marketing mistakes back in 2015 and overcompensated with nearly 200 variant covers for the TMNT: The Last Ronin series and an appalling $8.99 cover price on the individual issues. IDW boasts a massive 840,000 copies of the first five issues were sold to retailers. With the success of the collected version, the series has produced over one million units in circulation making it the biggest marketing success for IDW Publishing.   

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 is just there. He never takes on any of the familiar 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? There is an animated version in the works but I anticipate this approach 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 our remaining turtle has mutated more over the years causing him to be larger than the previous version of the turtles. He is also battle-hardened and wear but I’m still not prepared to give them a pass. If they wanted to withhold the reveal in the first issue until the end, they could have played up on the ninja aspect of our character and skillfully used a silent gimmick throughout the first issue rather than just operate as though they’re all indistinguishable from each other. While Eastman & Laird’s early stuff portrayed them as indistinguishable, Waltz’s run portrayed them all with different skin tones, personality, and body types.