Entertainment Weekly has revealed that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' "Roninverse" will continue to expand this year with The Last Ronin: Training Day. The prequel comic puts the spotlight back on Michelangelo.
The Last Ronin revealed that Mikey was the last surviving member of the four Heroes in a Half-Shell, and followed him as he attempted to avenge the deaths of Leonardo, Raphael, and Donatello. Set in a future inspired by Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, he squared off with Shredder's grandson, the new leader of the Foot Clan.
Michelangelo ultimately fell, but a prequel/sequel series, The Last Ronin: The Lost Years, explored his dark transformation. That also featured the debut of a new group of Turtles—Odyn, Moja, Uno, and Yi—who emerge under the tutelage of sensei Casey Marie Jones, the daughter of Casey Jones and April O'Neil.
April later died in The Last Ronin II: Re-Evolution, and while The Last Ronin III is officially in the works, The Last Ronin: Training Day will expand on Mikey's relationship with Casey Marie.
"While we were going through what he called the Roninverse, there were so many back alleys and stories and things that we couldn't fit into the 200 pages that we had," TMNT co-creator Kevin Eastman tells the site. "One of the ones was just having Michelangelo spend time with Casey Marie Jones."
"[Mikey] could see the spark and he could see the light and he could see the beauty in what Casey Marie Jones felt and wanted to believe in," he adds. "He wanted to lean into Splinter's journal of what he trained and what he learned from that, and directing towards this protector of the city thing, which the Turtles originally grew into."
Co-written by Tom Waltz with artwork by the Escorza brothers, Ben Bishop, Luis Antonio Delgado, and Shawn Lee, The Last Ronin: Training Day comes shortly after we learned that Paramount Pictures has scrapped plans for an R-rated live-action adaptation of The Last Ronin.
"I don't think the movie's off the table," Eastmen reveals. "I think it's just delayed. Speaking with all the folks at Viacom and Paramount and Nickelodeon who love the Turtles and really have done a fantastic job, whether it be the 2012 series to Mutant Mayhem, I don't think it will not happen. I think it will happen."
"One of the things that anybody I've talked to at the companies, they know the fans love and support all things Last Ronin, as much as another group of fans love everything Point Grey [Pictures, production company], Seth Rogan and Evan Goldberg, everybody's done with the whole Mutant Mayhem series. We're not disheartened at all."
It was last November when we learned that a new live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie is in the works. The Fast and the Furious franchise producer Neal H. Moritz is overseeing the project for Paramount.
Nobody director Ilya Naishuller had been in talks to direct The Last Ronin, though we recently learned that "the new regime wasn’t keen on having the first non-animated movie in 10 years be a bloody, adult-skewing story."
Check out a first look at The Last Ronin: Training Day below ahead of its release this July.