Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin III — Return for New York, the third and final chapter in Kevin Eastman and Tom Waltz’s Roninverse trilogy, will arrive next summer. Entertainment Weekly revealed the project and its cover today.
“When [co-creator] Kevin Eastman and I sat down to write the original TMNT: The Last Ronin, we had high hopes readers would love the story just as much as we loved telling it,” Waltz told EW. “Little did we know, that love would be exponentially returned to us and our amazing art teams…From that first volume, throughout all the subsequent prequels/sequels that have followed in what we now fondly call the Roninverse. And, here we are, capping off the main trilogy with TMNT: The Last Ronin III — Return for New York…and we couldn’t be happier!”
The original creative team of Eastman, Waltz, Isaac and Esau Escorza, Luis Antonio Delgado and Ben Bishop will return for this final chapter.
The cover, by the Escorza brothers and Delgado, is an homage to the original Last Ronin cover and features Casey Marie Jones, daughter of the now-deceased Casey Jones and April O’Neil.
“It’s hard to believe this journey started nearly 40 years ago with a simple 25-page outline by Peter Laird and myself—finally brought to life with such an incredible creative team, the support of Nickelodeon and IDW, and most of all the fans,” Eastman told EW.” We couldn’t have done it without you! We all hope this final installment of this trilogy is worthy, we’re all working hard to bring this important part of this next generation of Ninja Turtles to a place we never dreamed we’d be able to when we first started. Thanks a billion trillion!”
EW also reported that the flagship Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series will get a new creative team in January. If Destruction Be Our Lot writer Matthew Rosenberg and Iron Man artist Juann Cabal will take over the title with issue #25, kicking off an arc where a host of Turtles villains, old and new, hunt the team down over a single night.