TMNT: Last Ronin is Delivering Where DC & Marvel Can't
Warning: contains spoilers for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin
With The Last Ronin, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are starring in a better dystopia than anything DC or Marvel has produced in a decade. The new TMNT story comes right after DC's Future State event and a handful of new releases in Marvel's The End line of books but manages to succeed where both comic titans have failed; resolving past plot lines and saying something meaningful about the source material.
Though there are a handful of standout titles, DC's Future State as a whole fails on a premise level. Too much of the event just doesn't need to be set in the future. Future State: Superman/Wonder Woman tells an interesting story, but there is little in it that couldn't have been set in the main continuity. The same is true for most of the Future State titles involving Gotham. Even the ones that definitely couldn't be set in current continuity are so needlessly grim that they end up being about nothing. Teen Titans is easily the worst offender as it sees the Titans inadvertently causing an apocalypse that kills fan-favorite team members. By the event's end, readers are given the impression that Future State is just a stop-gap while DC sets up Infinite Frontier. It says very little about the characters it's ostensibly about or their legacy.
While Marvel hasn't dipped their toes into dark futures as often as DC, they did recently continue their The End line of books which imagines the endpoint of some of their classic heroes. They vary wildly in terms of quality, but in general have the opposite problem of Future State; the stories don't feel like natural conclusions for their heroes. Miles Morales: The End takes place in a post-apocalyptic future dominated by mutated creatures. Captain America: The End shows a future where the world is infected by a zombie-like plague that turns people into the Red Skull. Neither of these stories are logical ends for either character.
In contrast to all of that is the Dark Knight Returns-esque Last Ronin. The Turtle's final journey comes from their creators Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird as well as writer Tom Waltz and artists Esau and Isaac Escorza. The series sees the last remaining turtle, Michaelangelo, facing off against a dystopian city run by the Shredder's grandson. The story works as an alternate future because it's easy to understand how the Turtles went from their status quo to this dark future. Additionally, though the story is bleak, it doesn't languish in its darkness. There are far more bits of humanity and hope than readers could expect from many of Future State's titles.
Where The Last Ronin succeeds though is in what it ends up saying about the TMNT. Last Ronin's visceral violence is a far cry from the cartoonish fights readers expect from the turtles. Mikey's attachment to his dead brothers has manifested as hallucinations, commenting on the theme of brotherhood that sits at the heart of TMNT. In the same way that Days Of Future Past and Kingdom Come redefined some of Marvel and DC's greatest heroes by showing them in a dark future, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin uses a dystopia to paint the turtles in a whole new light.