3 out of 5

I am really not enjoying The Last Ronin sequel, “The Lost Years.” I’ll speak to that when I review it, but it’s essentially a “leave well enough alone” story that feels so hard-pressed to milk the success of The Last Ronin by tying it into current IDW books, and also to over-exposit details to use that were more interesting when left unknown.

So I was doubly skeptical of a one-shot special coming in the middle of the series, seeming like a very Marvel / DC cash-in move that just continues to beat its fans wallets out of the justified belief that they’ll buy it if they believe it ties into the main book.

That would still tie into a remaining criticism of this book, alongside some content nits: that, at this point in “The Lost Years” story, I’m not sure any of this will be needed, as Years is in the past, relative to Last Ronin, and Lost Day is in the present. The only other link is that they wind up in the same timeline, and that Lost Day does do some flashbacks, but not in any Lost Years (or even Last Ronin, really) hyper-specific fashion. But maybe the ending of Lost Years will tie into this; I guess we’ll see.

Otherwise, with the rating as an obvious indication, I was really surprised by this book. I think the structure of it is questionable – it does modern day via Ben Bishop’s pencils, some pre-Last Ronin stuff via Esau and Isaac Escorza, then, er, post-modern day reflections on the issue’s events via black and white Freddie E. Williams II-draws-like-Kevin-Eastman-so-we-can-bill-Eastman-as-the-topline-artist-when-he’s-only-doing-inks April journal entries – which is a very cluttered way to tell a straightforward story of gramma April taking the new young turtles on a secret above-ground set of adventures, but… the book pulls it off. While this all may’ve been to balance out extra pages with artist time constraints so IDW could charge some extra buckeroos, the visual changeups are organized (the sequence and page length for each section is set), and I think encouraged Tom Waltz (and Eastman? though I keep figuring he’s mostly doing plotting) to curb his most egregious writerly fault of over-writing. Which is the main problem with Lost Years. Here, though, his gab is focused on the April journal entries, and maybe the old-school visuals and montage nature of those page’s layouts suit that wordiness; elsewhere, while it’s still a lot of April VO, Waltz lets the artists pick up a lot of the acting and action. Even within that, you can spot so many unnecessary words, but the pacing and less need to backwards justify every moment makes it much more tolerable.

Plus: old April is fun, whereas old Mikey in Lost Years, as written by Waltz and Eastman… not so much. Moreso a collection of every angsty and cheesy comic book trope. I’m also very annoyed at how these two write the kids’ / teen’s dialogue, but they’re hardly the only offenders of old-men-writing-youths as either mealy-mouthed babies or cringey-memespeak, with this outing favoring the former, but again again, the structure here helps as it breaks up our time dealing with that, and the story is also mostly from April’s POV.

Lastly, an indirect compliment: I liked the overall tale. The endpoint is mostly obvious, but that’s not a bad thing, and using April’s collection of various goods to get to that endpoint is a smart way to do world-building via show and not tell, and do some thematic stuff much more succinctly than in Lost Years. And the cluttered way that tale is told doesn’t corrupt the solidity of it. (Even if I feel it would’ve been better just told linearly…)

I still highly suspect this won’t tie much into Lost Years, but oh well. If we’re going to beat The Last Ronin horse into the ground (and presumably we will), let’s do it via more standalone episodes like this, versus dragged out overhauls of the mythology.