“The Last Ronin” and the 3 Act Structure

In The Last Ronin, we see a good example of how comics can operate outside of traditional literary structures. Here, a simple variation on the 3 act structure can offer us some important insight – not just on this story but on all the stories we tell.

In a longstanding franchise, however, the 3AS proportions don’t work. Typically, the origin story is delivered in near-entirety in the first issue (as is the case with the Mirage TMNT). When ending a longstanding franchise, your proportion is going to come in at like 1:98:1.

This isn’t necessarily a problem, of course, but it does allow us to ponder the impacts of an unusual structure in franchise-ending stories such that we see in iconic comics closers like “The Dark Knight Returns,” or “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?”

In these instances, and in “The Last Ronin,” the disproportionate structure (in the eyes of the audience) can cause issues such as unresolved threads, incomplete character arcs, and fundamental inconsistencies with how the conflict was explored in the 2nd act.

The Last Ronin might benefit, however, from being scripted when TMNT was just 11 issues in. This gives the story a stripped-down feel and an engagement with the franchise at a time when it was still quite young.

For the reader, of course, that’s not exactly the case and, as discussed in a previous thread, it is genuinely hard not to read this story as a bookend for the entire franchise in all of its many permutations (hee hee, ‘mutations’).

The effect here might be seen as something like whiplash: a massive time jump that skips over decades of 2nd act continuity and conflict-exploration followed by 5 issues with which to put the entire story of the ninja turtles to bed, so to speak.

It’s abrupt in that sense, but so are most real-world endings,so the lingering 3rd act traditional to Western lit. might actually be the less-realistic, where stories like “The Last Ronin” can instead create a breakneck pace that conveys things like desperation and shock.

This naturally leads to some deeply fun questions about how stories should setup and convey the actual concept of “final” – what a good ending should entail, on what grounds we evaluate an ending as good, and why those values are important to us?

The point then, if there is one, is that AU comics finales are not better or worse – just different. But in a literary landscape that is far more entrenched in its structural patterns than most realize, it’s compelling to see a different structure peek out of its shell.