Back in 2020 IDW Publishing released the first issue of what has become one of the most popular stories in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise of all time, The Last Ronin. Similar in tone and style to The Dark Knight Returns, it told the tale of a grim future, one where only one brother from the TMNT family lived, and fought using the weapons of his entire clan. The comic quickly became a sensation and has now spawned one of the coolest fan animations that you’ve ever seen. As noticed by CBR, YouTube channel Speedokaggen, spearheaded by Magnus Edlund, created a stellar, photo-real animated adaptation of part of The Last Ronin that must be seen to be believed.
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“It’s been such an unexpected response to (The Last Ronin),” TMNT co-creator and Last Ronin scribe Kevin Eastman previously told ComicBook.com. “That really was the idea that was based on a concept that Pete and I had created back in 1987, and it came together. Tom [Waltz] and I built it into the story that it’s become, and then it was unfortunate, even as it started in the earliest days, that creatively, our team that I brought in initially to help realize the concept didn’t quite work out. So we were almost five months behind before it even started….With the incredible amount of detail, it’s almost like directing a movie in that each part of it has a script and a very basic script, but it evolves as I do the layouts. That’s how the story comes together, the way it used to back in the earliest days when Pete and I worked together.”
The runaway success of The Last Ronin will no doubt spur the potential for more follow-ups set in this grim Would-be future world. In fact, the series itself concluded not with a cement “The End” tag, but the set-up for a new story and even the indicator of “To be continued…” Details about what comes next aren’t known yet, but IDW is apparently cooking something up.
“Oh… standby, sports fans,” co-writer Tom Waltz told CBR about a follow-up. “I can’t give specifics yet, but suffice to say, we are not done with what we are now lovingly calling “The Ronin-verse.” Big announcements coming soon!
