The future of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is finally going to be revealed. Franchise co-creator Kevin Eastman recently found a story that he and co-creator Peter Laird wrote in 1987, which never saw the light of day. This story is the basis for the upcoming comic book miniseries titled The Last Ronin from Eastman and Laird, along with co-writer Tom Waltz and inker Andy Kuhn. This should be pretty exciting news for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fans from all over the world who have been waiting for a story like this from Laird and Eastman.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin is a five issue comic book miniseries from IDW Publishing. The series will launch later this year, with each issue consisting of 48 pages, featuring cover art by Kevin Eastman. There are also two special edition covers by Eastman and Mateus Santolouco. Eastman had this to say about the new story.
"About ten years ago, I re-discovered a twenty page outline for a TMNT story that Peter and I wrote together back in 1987. The story was set thirty years in the future, which, as written then, was set in 2017. Reading through it again, I drifted back to a very different time in TMNT history - back 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 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles future storyline has been revised to take the characters to the year 2040. The world is polluted even further in 2040 and it looks like, outside of barriers meant to keep people in, the world isn't safe for humans anymore. It certainly has a dark tone and it looks like the Turtles may be a little sick of each other after working together for so long. Tom Waltz had this to say about the story.
"When Kevin first showed me the outline that he and Peter had created back in the '80s, I was gobsmacked. 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."
Kevin Eastman calls Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin "a heartfelt love poem to all the TMNT universes of the past[that] offers up an intense look at one possible future." Eastman went on to note that the story is "firmly based on and adapted from an original thirty-three year-old idea, from the original creators." While Peter Laird is receiving writing credit, it doesn't look like he took part in the revision process, though that is unclear at the moment.
Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird were reunited by the Netflix show The Toys That Made Us for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles episode and fans have been waiting for them to do something creative together for decades. While details on The Last Ronin don't explicitly state that Laird was involved in the revision process, the story still has his name on it. This may be the closest thing to a reunion that we see from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles creators. You can check out some images from the miniseries below, thanks to The Hollywood Reporter.
