WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin #1, by Kevin Eastman, Peter Laird, Tom Waltz, Esau, Isaac Escorza, Ben Bishop, Samuel Plata, Luis Antonio Delgado, and Shawn Lee, on sale now.

The Last Ronin is the Ninja Turtles entry into the old man hero sub-genre. Telling the story of the sole surviving turtle in a dystopian future, it has a lot in common with iconic stories like the Dark Knight Returns and Old Man Logan.

One way it differs from its predecessors is its villain. The Ronin doesn't face off with an elderly version of Shredder, who is neither seen nor mentioned in the first issue. Instead, he faces a younger member of Shredder's family in his grandson, Oroku Hiroto.

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Hiroto runs the dystopian version of New York City and takes credit for wiping out the Turtles a decade before. He seems more annoyed than anything else that one survived. When the Ronin calls him out, Hiroto calls him an idiot for thinking he'd "soil his hands" with him. Unlike his grandfather, Hiroto is perfectly happy to let others do his bidding instead of getting involved personally. His last line of defense, a Stockman Tech Mouser, can knock the Ronin out of a window and onto the streets below before he can even reach Hiroto. The Ronin describes Hiroto as the "bastard son" of Shredder's daughter, Karai. He keeps her in suspended animation at the top level of his tower and reassures his incapacitated mother that everything is under control after the Ronin's attack.

Hiroto's New York City is a dystopian surveillance state, where he can keep an eye on everything with monitors. Even the water surrounding the city are poisonous for anyone but a mutant turtle. The only advantage is that Hiroto is more concerned with keeping his people from getting out of the city than with anyone getting in and even the manholes have alarms, which takes the Turtles' home turf, the sewers, out of the equation. The Ronin has to make use of the flying cars that fill the sky to make his way to Hiroto's tower. The Ronin cuts through many of the new Foot clan who is more machine than man. The Ronin can use the eyeball of one to open a door with a retinal scanner, showing that there's some humanity to them and through his assault, he has the moral support from his dead brothers in the form of ghosts. None of the ghostly turtles give away their identities other than Donatello as his proficiency with machines gives him away. Hiroto's control of NYC looks overwhelming, but he's not without opposition. Beyond the Ronin, there's also a group of youths, including a woman named Jones who is likely related to the Turtles' ally Casey Jones, who help the Ronin escape execution from the Foot Clan. Jones finds him in the sewer, preparing to commit seppuku after his failed suicide mission.

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TMNT Last Ronin April Mikey

An aged April O'Neil also appears at the end of the issue, and while nursing him back to health in the sewers she reveals to the reader that he's Michelangelo. It looks like the Ronin will at least have some corporeal allies when he takes another shot at Hiroto in the darkest timeline TMNT fans have ever seen.

Like Old Man Logan, The Last Ronin opens in a world where the villains have won. How Hiroto succeeded where the rest of his family failed should also answer the series' other big question of how the Turtles were nearly wiped out.

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