IDW Entertainment is set to reveal a lost piece of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles history which in which draws from material from the original creators’ story which reveals the future of everybody’s favorite heroes in the half-shell.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin is a five-issue comic book miniseries by TMNT co-creator Kevin Eastman in conjunction with co-writer Tom Waltz and inker Andy Kuhn, as they take the reptile warriors two decades into a future as first imagined by Eastman and co-creator Peter Laird for a storyline that never saw the light of day.
In a statement reported by The Hollywood Reporter, Eastman said about the upcoming series,
“About 10 years ago, I re-discovered a 20-page outline for a TMNT story that Peter and I wrote together back in 1987. The story was set 30 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.”
Eastman also described the finished product as “a heartfelt love poem to all the TMNT universes of the past [that] offers up an intense look at one possible future — firmly based on and adapted from an original 33-year-old idea, from the original creators.”
Before he shared the story with Waltz, Eastman revisited and updated the storyline, moving the setting further into the future to the year 2040.
Waltz, who’s been collaborating with Eastman on the franchise since IDW took over publication in 2011, said in the same statement,
“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.”
The series will launch later this year. with each issue running 48 pages, with the first being released in three editions: a regular edition featuring cover artwork by Eastman and two retailer incentive editions, featuring a cover by Eastman and a cover by Mateus Santolouco; the regular cover and interior pages can be seen below.
