Turtle power! The original incarnation of the heroes in a half shell was in a creator-owned comic book that took off in a big way.
by Rich Watson
The eighties saw a wave of independently-produced comic books hit the market, created by entrepreneurial artists of wildly varying talent. Many went unnoticed against the likes of Spider-Man and Superman.
One that launched in 1984 was an odd martial arts book with a cumbersome title—Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
It became a juggernaut.
Nineties comic books
I grew up as a visual artist who read superhero comics and aspired to make them. In 1992, a group of artists left Marvel at the height of their popularity to form their own company, Image Comics. Their books sold in record numbers, but my art college friends and I were less than impressed with them. Some of us joined Marvel and DC in an attempt to buck the trend Image was creating: heavily stylized art, with questionable anatomy and layouts—to say the very least.
Others, like me, worked outside the system to make more of the kind of comics we wanted to see return. We self-published material, photocopying them at Kinko’s and self-distributing them, one comic shop and convention at a time.
I believed my work had to look like X-Men or Justice League, from the eighties or earlier (i.e. traditional), to get noticed. It wasn’t until later in the decade, thanks in part to the cleaner, sleeker style of Batman: The Animated Series that my attitude, and my own artistic style, changed.
Had I made comics a decade earlier, I might’ve reached this conclusion sooner.
Eighties comic books
In the eighties, Marvel and DC diverged from their usual superhero material, in innovative directions. DC, in addition to the groundbreaking mini-series The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen, published books like Swamp Thing, Animal Man and Sandman, by UK writers who took superheroes far into left field. Marvel had their Epic imprint, which produced original, Heavy Metal-like works of fantasy and sci-fi. Epic also published pre-established titles Elfquest and Groo, which came with their own followings.
Making their presence felt, however, were independent comics, branching out from the underground days of Robert Crumb and Harvey Pekar from the sixties, some with touches of European or Japanese influences: Cerebus, Love and Rockets, American Flagg, Nexus, Mage, Zot, Rocketeer, and more.
There was also “a tsunami of crap:” amateurish, self-published material that came and went, but fueling those works were the hopes and dreams of hundreds of Jack Kirby-wannabes who, like me in the nineties, believed they had a chance to make a dent in the market and earn some money in the process.
Into this field came Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird.
Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird
Eastman, from Maine, and Laird, from Massachusetts, met in 1983 in the small New Hampshire town of Dover. Their shared love of comics drove them to collaborate on work of their own, under the name Mirage Studios.
One day, just for laughs, Eastman drew a turtle in a ninja mask, wielding nunchucks. Laird drew a version of his own, then Eastman drew four of them. Laird inked it and added the “teenage mutant” moniker.
They did it to goof around at first. Then they thought seriously about it.
Martial arts in general, and ninjas specifically, had exploded in pop culture during the seventies and early eighties, thanks to the likes of Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris, the TV show Kung Fu, the Eric van Lustbader novel The Ninja, the 1981 film Enter the Ninja, and more.
Frank Miller’s celebrated run on Daredevil at Marvel was infused with Japanese martial arts tropes, as was his mini-series Ronin at DC. In Daredevil’s origin, the hero, Matt Murdock, saves the life of a blind man but gets blinded himself by a radioactive isotope from a canister… because during the sixties, such things were all over the place. That’s why you see so many superhumans today.
Eastman and Laird used that as the basis for what would become the Turtles. In their origin, that same canister collided with some dude who had four turtles in a fishbowl. It fell into a sewer—and, as radiation is wont to do, changed the protagonists into something cooler.
The Turtles in comics
Those animals became turtle-humanoid hybrids. Adopted and trained by a samurai rat named Splinter, these teenage mutants became:
- Leonardo, who wields a katana (a sword),
- Donatello, who carries a bo (a staff),
- Michaelangelo [sic], who uses nunchucks, and
- Raphael, who employs a sai (a three-pointed dagger).
Eastman and Laird couldn’t think of Japanese names for their creations, so they used Laird’s art history book for inspiration.
Their initial TMNT book premiered in May 1984. They used borrowed money from Eastman’s uncle, plus their own savings, to make approximately three thousand copies. Their ad in the trade publication Comics Buyer’s Guide helped with sales.
They learned from their hero, Kirby, the value of owning their own work, as Eastman explains in this Newsweek interview from earlier this summer:
It was commonplace for the corporation that you worked for [that they] owned the rights to all your characters and anything you created was owned by them. So we were well aware, even around the time that Peter and I started, there was a lot of challenges to industry professionals trying to get Kirby more credit for his rights ownership profits from the characters he created. So we knew how lucky we were that we created something we owned fully.
Eastman and Laird sold copies of their black-and-white, magazine-sized issue for $1.50 each at a convention in New Hampshire. Not only did it sell, they had to return for multiple printings.
A year later, Laird remained flabbergasted at TMNT’s success:
…We are freaked out, blown away, dumbstruck, awed, frightened, and flattered, among other things. I am writing this on April 16, 1985, and it was almost precisely one year ago that we were getting the first run of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1’s back from our printer. One year—and the comic book we were afraid would sit around in our living room in unsold boxes is now being sold for approximately what a Conan #1 would go for. Believe me—this really blows our minds!
TMNT inspired copycats, featuring martial arts comics with hamsters, kangaroos, even elephants.
But it was only the beginning.
Multimedia success and newer comics
The first volume of TMNT lasted sixty-two issues, plus assorted mini-series and specials. In 1987, Playmates Toys acquired the license to the characters from Eastman and Laird, however, they toned down the comic’s violence and made the Turtles much more kid-friendly—the softer character design, the love of pizza, “Cowabunga,” etc.
You know what followed: cartoons, movies, action figures, video games, the works. Laird is on the record as disliking the changes made to appeal to kids, but they both agreed to them.
Eastman sold his stake in the Turtles to Laird in 2000. Nine years later, Laird sold it to Viacom, now known as Paramount Global. Mirage Studios shut down in 2021.
After subsequent TMNT comics, including a brief run at a more artistically-diverse Image in the late nineties, plus new Turtles material by Laird, IDW now publishes TMNT and its spin-offs, with Eastman’s participation.
The Turtles comic was a case of being in the right place at the right time.
It paid off.
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Also in 1984:
- Marvel Comics publishes the original Secret Wars limited series.
- Marv Wolfman and George Perez’ run on New Teen Titans begins at DC Comics.
- Akira Toriyama’s Dragon Ball is first serialized in Weekly Shonen Jump.
- Antarctic Press, home of comics such as Gold Digger, Warrior Nun Areala and Box Office Poison, among others, is created.
- The Cartoon Art Museum opens in San Francisco.
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Did you read the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic book? Leave a comment and let me know!
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