Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin

The one TMNT book to hand a skeptic who wants a single, finished story. In a battle-ravaged future New York, the last surviving brother sets out alone to avenge his family, and black-and-white flashbacks fill in the losses that led him there. It grew from a lost outline by co-creators Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, scripted with longtime series writer Tom Waltz and drawn by Eastman with Esau and Isaac Escorza, and it goes darker than any cartoon or earlier comic dared: this is a world where the Turtles lost. Knowing the four brothers and Splinter is enough. The collected hardcover of all five issues reached the New York Times bestseller list, and it is the way to read it.