2 out of 5

The Last Ronin gets the full IDW Turtles treatment, i.e. adding on a needless mini-series to the main story that hardly advances anything beyond some essentially superficial aspects. I mean, fair, comics is a business, and you make money how you can, including doing tie-ins and using branding to get followers to buy your book. And The Last Ronin is tempting for exploration, given its time-jump narrative, but setting aside the background notoriety of that series – that it was an Eastman / Laird idea, kicking around in a drawer – it was very complete, and much more impactful due to its left-to-the-imagination aspects. But don’t you want to know how Mikey became The Last Ronin? Not… really? It’s baked into the story we already read, and finding out, like, how he got that cool coat hardly tells that story any better.

Still, I get it: moneys aside, when someone has a good idea – like Ronin – it’s hard to not want to play in the sandbox of that idea. But I’d rather that take the form of moving the story forward (like the accompanying special that appeared halfway through this series) than kicking over the minor plot piles in the past, and we’re just not far enough along in the history of this book for anything explored in The Lost Years being all that revelatory. The opposite: they’re demystifying in a disastifying way.

So this is, by my take, a poor starting point, and the rest of it is made poorer by an overcluttered telling, which does flashback / present day / flashback / flashback-within-a-flashback, flashback-within-a-flashback-within-a-flashback to allow the IDW scribes their worst tendencies – endless, endless fanservice and callbacks to things we read, like, a page ago – and what I believe to be a frustrating habit specific to Waltz, of doing so much telling versus showing, over-narrating Mikey’s POV to excess, and rather misusing the brothers-in-his-head device in the same way, overdoing it such that it loses meaning.

In Lost Years, we follow Mikey on a several years quest to battle Death Worm, a gang leader who stands in the way of the turtle attaining peace post losing his family. That’s an acceptable arc for putting the turtle through the crucible of becoming the grizzled vet we saw in The Last Ronin – he goes through various insults to injury in trying to track down DW – but it plays the tragedy porn a bit too hard (continually flashing back to shots of slain turtles / Fugitoid / etc., just off screen) and assumes bloodshed makes it a “mature” story, when it’s ultimately a stream of plot tropes and meaningless mantras said with cold stares into the distance, shuffling us through the aforementioned references, i.e. “hey, remember this plot point from Last Ronin?”

Artist Si Gallant is certainly competent, following the bulky character framework of Ronin artists Esau and Isaac Escorza, though their page layouts are not as dynamic; the camera always feels “close,” and the movement from panel-to-panel seems dictacted by fitting in the narration, and not necessarily what might be best for telling the story. And despite taking place in different locales / climes, many of the settings feel interchangeable, though that might also be because of Maria Keane’s mid-range color palette. Ben Bishop takes up the “present” day scenes; it’s hard to figure out how I feel about these because they’re obnoxious – overwrought morals and baby-mouthed turtles goo-gawing so annoyingly while Casey and April dote. The need for these sections adds to the list of story elements that feel superfluous – I can’t say they truly enhanced Mike’s journey, and only seem like a forced way to connect this “lost” tale to the present day of Ronin, i.e. assuming the reader won’t make connections themselves, and needs baby turtles saying, in effect, “what would Mikey do?” so Waltz and Eastman can tell us that issue’s tale…

The last issue is solid, dropping the over-exposition so we can wrap up, but shows off how much of an underwhelming endpoint Death Worm is: just a name to give Mike a goal toward which to trudge. They’re indicative of the feeling of this book overall – a conclusion (The Last Ronin), and then going backwards to fill in the details to make that conclusion make sense. Again, though, The Last Ronin was self-contained; it didn’t need more justification.

There are story beats throughout that, in isolation, work, and it feels wrong to one-star a story that… isn’t any better or worse than the majority of IDW Turtles arcs. So in that regard: it’s consistent. But I suppose I take a bit more offense this time out because this starts to step on the effectiveness of Ronin as a standalone, and does so in a way that doesn’t add anything all that necessary to the world.