Late to the Party: The Last Ronin
An unexpected late-night read that rekindled my love for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
First post! I think I’ll be using this Substack as a place to store my thoughts about media I love. Twitter tends to be where you’ll find my “hot takes” on the TTRPG industry, as is the Asians Represent Podcast. Patreon is where I post about progress on my independent design projects. But what about my other interests?
I had experimented with TikTok for a while, but have come to feel like that platform is turning my brain to mush. There, I’d post about my love of manga, comics, and miscellaneous geekery. Without saying I feel too old to keep up with TikTok… Substack feels like a good repository for “Daniel’s late night thoughts”.
So let’s start with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles…or at least one of them.
Once there were four brothers. Now, only one remains.
On a whim, I decided to read The Last Ronin, a five issue miniseries published by IDW that saw the co-creators of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird) reunite for an unexpected tale about trauma and revenge.
The Turtles have always been a part of my life. The first video game I remember playing was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time on the Super Nintendo. I fondly remember my childhood neighbour Shane giving me a couple of his Playmates Toys TMNT action figures (which my mother sadly sold at a yard sale during my university years). The live action films were mind blowing (despite visions of the cursed costumes) and the 90s, 2003, and 2012 animated series hold distinct places in my memory (I really loved the 2003 series). With all that said, I’d consider myself a lifelong (but not hardcore) fan.
The Last Ronin is set in a dark future where Michelangelo, the only surviving turtle of a prolonged war between the Foot and the Hamato clans, embarks on a quest to assassinate Oroku Hiroto, the son of Karai and grandson of Oroku Saki (Shredder). To do so, he must infiltrate a dystopian Manhattan crawling with a cyborg Foot ninja police force that imposes the totalitarian rulings of Hiroto.
While the “infiltrate the fortified city to assassinate the oppressive megalomaniac” is far from unique, the character development for the iconic Michelangelo gripped me from cover to cover.
No longer carefree and unorthodox, he now embodies all of the qualities that defined his late brothers - cynical, disciplined, analytical, and precise.
Haunted by visions of his brothers, Michelangelo is driven by his survivor’s guilt as he travels down this bloody path of vengeance. Through a series of flashbacks and fateful reunions with familiar characters, you witness all of the loss he’s suffered throughout the years leading up to his last mission.
This is a TMNT story like no other.
Dark, violent, and emotional - I wish I had read The Last Ronin when it came out in 2020. Alongside Spider-Man: Blue (one of my favourites), The Last Ronin is a fantastic, albeit short diversion from the “main” story that explores the consequences of being a hero and how vengeance weighs on your soul.
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