Cowabunga! A Look Back at 40 Years of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Forty years ago, in May of 1984, two young, unknown men sat at a table at a comic book convention in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. It was the first-ever Portsmouth Mini-Con, a tiny, local event with about 200 attendees. The two young creators had brought along their new comic, which they had published through their own independent publishing company, Mirage Studios, with an initial print run of 3,275 copies. It was printed in black and white on cheap newsprint, and copies sold for $1.50 each.
There was no reason to believe that this deliberately silly, cheaply produced comic would change comics and pop culture history or that one of those $1.50 copies would someday be worth thousands, if not tens of thousands, of dollars on the collectors’ market. But this was the debut outing of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1.
The Turtles were the brainchild of Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird. The year before, they’d been goofing around, and Eastman had drawn a turtle standing on its hind legs, wielding nunchucks. Laird added the words “teenage mutant.” They were riffing on the most popular comics of the era: the teens of DC’s The New Teen Titans, the mutants of Marvel’s Uncanny X-Men, and the ninjas of Marvel’s Daredevil. (The turtle part was the punchline, but it played into a strong comic tradition of funny animals.)
That first turtle was given three brothers, and the brothers were given the names of Italian Renaissance artists — Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, and Michelangelo (as if you didn’t already know that) — as a bit of added silliness. The creators drew a comic, emptied their bank accounts and borrowed money to print it, ran a full-page ad in Comic Buyer’s Guide to get retailers’ attention, and set up their table in Portsmouth.
The gamble worked. Within weeks, they sold out and had to reprint. Demand was so high that they decided to turn their one-shot into a series. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #2 had 15,000 preorders. Issue #3 had 50,000 preorders. Cowabunga!
If you’re around my age — I am one month older than the Turtles — you don’t need to be told about the total world domination (turtle world domination?) that stemmed from that little comic that could. As a kid, I knew the Turtles as a glitzy corporate franchise, with a long-running cartoon, live-action movies, video games, action figures, Hostess Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Pies (they were green!), and a live show at Radio City Music Hall. But for this anniversary, I thought I’d dive into TMNT #1 and see where Turtlemania all began.
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