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Stan Sakai writes TMNT: The First Ronin for March 2027, and his Turtles are yokai rather than mutants
Forty years of Usagi Yojimbo have put Stan Sakai in 1600s Japan more often than any other cartoonist working in American comics, so the surprise in IDW’s announcement this week is not that he is writing a period Turtles book. It is that his Turtles are not mutants.
IDW announced Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The First Ronin on Thursday evening, ahead of its New York Comic Con panel on Friday morning. It is a five-issue miniseries, it reaches comic shops in March 2027, Sakai writes it and designs it, and Soo Lee draws it. The publisher is selling it as a spiritual predecessor to The Last Ronin, and IDW chief executive Davidi Jonas called that book “an undeniable pop culture phenomenon.”
The story is set in 1600s Japan. A general named Kameyama, a soldier and a tactician, is losing a war he cannot win, and after the last of his allies fall, four yokai arrive to fight beside him. Yokai are the supernatural creatures of Japanese folklore, but the four Sakai has drawn look like humanoid turtles [1].
Every Turtles origin that has reached print or screen since 1984 begins with the same accident: ordinary turtles, a canister, a mutagen, a rat. Sakai has taken the mutagen out.
“It will have new variations of the Turtles, not mutants this time but yokai,” he said. “That is just one of the surprises in store.” He also said he has been a fan since 1984, and that he enjoyed all of their incarnations, The Last Ronin included.
Soo Lee, a Bram Stoker Award winner, is on art. “If there ever was a TMNT story that I would want to draw, this spin on the Turtles team is it,” she said, and added that working with Sakai is a dream come true. Her cover A is the one IDW led with: a lone armoured archer with his back to us, standing in blue grass under a white sun on a flat red field, and not a turtle in sight.
Sakai’s own cover B puts the Turtles on the front, where Lee’s does not. They crowd a bamboo forest in his line, each armed differently, and the turtle at the centre is mid-shout with a sword raised, drawn with the same brush he has used on Usagi Yojimbo for decades.
The trade dress on the art IDW sent out prices the issue at $8.99 US, which we read off the cover itself rather than off a listing. There are eleven covers in all [2].
IDW used the same announcement to confirm the finale. TMNT: The Last Ronin III - Return for New York is also down for 2027, reuniting Kevin Eastman, Tom Waltz, the Escorza Brothers, Ben Bishop and Luis Antonio Delgado [3].
Two things IDW has not said. It has not named a colourist or a letterer, normal enough this far out, but a real gap in a book being sold on how it looks. And it has not said whether The First Ronin is the Turtles title inside IDW Goes Dark, the horror line it confirmed on October 5 and promised to fill out across show week; nothing in this announcement calls The First Ronin a horror book, so we are not going to tell you that it is one. AIPT says issue one can be pre-ordered through a local shop, but we found no online listing when we looked on October 9.
Why it matters to a Turtles fan
The Turtles began in 1984 as a parody, with Frank Miller’s Ronin and his Daredevil both inside the joke, and the Japan in that first issue is the Japan of a 1980s American comic shop. Sakai has spent his working life in the real one. A book that moves the Turtles into 1600s Japan and makes them yokai rather than mutants pushes the premise back to where it was borrowed from, and IDW has handed that job to the one cartoonist in American comics who has spent his whole working life inside the period. March is a long way off!
Friday’s panel was the one we wrote up on October 8 as naming no Turtles title. It has one now. The rest of the show is on our NYCC 2026 hub.
Sources: AIPT; The Beat; ICv2; Bleeding Cool. Key art: IDW Publishing.
[1] IDW’s own text spells it with a macron over the second o. We write it plain, because this site is built ASCII only.
[2] A is Soo Lee, B is Sakai with Emi Fujii, then Ito, Fero Pe, Andrew K. Currey and a sketch variant, with retailer incentives from Julie Sakai, Soo Lee again, Godtail, Tokitokoro and Ito.
[3] IDW gave no month for Last Ronin III, only the year, and no issue count.
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