Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin
In a battle-ravaged future New York, a lone surviving Turtle hunts the family he lost—Eastman and Tom Waltz's dark, record-breaking final TMNT saga.
📖 IDW Publishing • Started 2020
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin is the Turtles’ The Dark Knight Returns—a grim, rain-soaked future in which a single turtle survives, a nameless, scarred old warrior carrying the weight of his fallen family. Perfect for fans of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, Old Man Logan, and Logan itself, it’s the most acclaimed TMNT story since the original 1984 comics, and it took more than three decades to reach the page.
The Last Turtle Standing
In a future New York City battered into a post-apocalyptic nightmare, one lone survivor of the once-great turtle clan embarks on a seemingly hopeless mission of vengeance against the forces that destroyed his family—a tyrant descended from the Shredder’s legacy. Over five issues published from October 2020 to April 2022 by IDW Publishing, the story peels back layer after layer of grief, revealing flashbacks to the family the ronin lost. Written by Kevin Eastman and Tom Waltz (who scripted the first 100 issues of IDW’s ongoing TMNT series) from a story concept Eastman and Peter Laird first sketched out back in 1987, with art by Esau and Isaac Escorza and Ben Bishop, the book is a love letter to the franchise’s roots filtered through a distinctly adult, R-rated sensibility.
The Phenomenon
The Last Ronin was an immediate and staggering hit: issue #2 became IDW’s highest-printed single issue ever, and the collected hardcover was a New York Times bestseller that went on to rank as the only Western comic in the top ten best-selling adult graphic novels of 2023. The “Ronin-verse” it spawned has become a franchise in its own right—a video game adaptation, a planned live-action film, and a wave of sequels and prequels including The Last Ronin—Lost Years, The Last Ronin II—Re-Evolution, and the 2026 one-shot Training Day.
For readers who grew up on the wisecracking Heroes in a Half Shell of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Last Ronin is a gut punch of a swan song—proof that the characters Eastman doodled in 1983 still have the power to break your heart.
