Weekly World News
May 15, 1990
By BEATRICE DEXTER

Cowabunga, dudes!  The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are much more than just the hottest heroes around – they’re a terrific influence on kids, experts say.

The phenomenal foursome teach their young fans to stick up for what they believe in and to have faith in themselves and their friends, according to top psychiatrists.

They help young children accept themselves and their feelings while teaching them self-control.  And the Turtles are easy for kids to relate to so they make great fantasy friends and role models, experts say.

“Much of the Turtles’ fascination appears related to a welcome ordinariness of their behavior and language, in spite of their weird appearance,” said psychiatrist Harvey R. Greenberg in a recent article on Ninjamania.  “The put-downs and puns that grownups find just plain dumb are hilariously familiar to children.”

“They also identify with their idols’ sloppy eating habits, their passion for junk food, and the slovenly comforts and secrecy of their underground clubhouse (the typical fan’s vision of his own room?).”

Dr. Greenberg says research by famous psychiatrist Bruno Bettelhelm indicates characters like the Turtles have immense powers for good.  They help children deal with their fears and reassure them that they can make their way in the strange and frightening world around them.

The Turtle heroes, whose famous war cry is “Cowabunga, dudes!”, strike the children as slow-moving defenseless creatures who nevertheless not only take care of themselves – but beat their enemies, too.

With the help of wise Splinter, a substitute parent, the Turtles learn to stand on their own feet and become Ninja warriors.  They also learn important life lessons: Use your brains to solve problems.  Don’t kill. Work together to vanquish evil.

“Youngsters project their ‘bad’ feelings upon a bad villain you have to hate, whose destruction is totally justified,” Dr. Greenberg pointed out.  “Fans might even learn to lighten up around their own brothers and sisters from watching these green brothers, stop abusing each other to team up against evil Shredder and company.”

Parents who worry that the Turtles are too violent can relax.

Dr. Greenberg says violent cartoon characters have never been proven to hurt kids.

Original works of art from Volume II are available here

“I still remember the e-mail asking me if I wanted to write the first Batman/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles crossover,” said series writer James Tynion IV. “My brain couldn’t even process what I was reading for a few seconds, and I started having a panic attack about fitting it into my work schedule. Then, finally, I pictured Michelangelo’s reaction to seeing the T. rex in the Batcave for the first time and started laughing out loud.”

“When I got the call asking if I would be interested in doing some covers for a Batman/TMNT crossover,” added Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles co-creator Kevin Eastman, “the ten-year-old Batman fan got up and ran around the room screaming at the top of his lungs with excitement…then the fifty-year-old life-long Batman fan did the same thing!”

“I am so incredibly proud of the series so far,” concluded Eastman. “Batman/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has easily been one of my biggest personal geek-out moments ever, and from what I’ve seen of series III, my advice to fans is to buckle up, things are about to get seriously crazy! Forever grateful that James and Freddie invited me into their backyard to play for a bit.”

Fans of the comic series will see the Dark Knight continue to fight like never before with wall-to-wall ninja action in BATMAN/TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES III beginning May 1, 2019.

This rag that you call a comic book is nothing but an over-priced, low-content piece of garbage.  For $1.50, I can buy a Marvel comic such as the X-Men Vs. The Avengers, which has beautifully colored pages, and the paper is of good stock.

You folks put out this black-and-white crap for the same buck-fifty, which in two years, will go the way of the dinosaur in terms of it’s physical life.

You say you have a readership of 125,000 and yet still you print the book in black-and-white.  One can only come to the conclusion that you two hypocrites are nothing but a couple of greedy swine who point at Marvel as you rake in the dough from collectors to children.

I would rather have a company hurt its employees, or ex-employees, than hurt the public, which you are guilty of.

But wait, T.M.N.T. has been produced in color.  But guess what?  The first three issues are placed into graphic novel form selling for $10.00!  Oh sure, 12 new pages, so those who have the first three have to buy the graphic novel to keep their collection intact.

I buy T.M.N.T. so that as time goes buy, I sell my copies to collectors, so I can complete my Marvel collection with the money from T.M.N.T. That is the only reason I would buy your tripe!

My theory is that people such as yourselves will never be able to create a fellow who climbs up and down walls and rooftops, while shooting webs out from his blue and red wrists.  I’m of course, speaking of the Amazing Spider-Man.

You do not have the talent (Lord knows you don’t have the originality) to ever create a character like the web-slinger.  Nor, for that matter, could you ever create a Fantastic Four, or an Iron Man, or an Original X-Men, much less a New X-Men.

So, you tear down those whom you can never hope to equal, much less surpass!

I put it to all those who attack Marvel, where are your Silver Surfers?  Where are your Mighty Thors and regal Sub-Mariners?  How about an Avengers? No… I do not see any of those in your books.

There is not one of your characters which will ever be as memorable as those that Marvel, specifically Lee, Kirby, and Ditko created, lo, those many years ago.

In closing, I hope other readers will write in and demand that the T.M.N.T.  be printed in color and not in graphic novel form either!  After all, I’ll get more money when I sell your rags, if they are in color.

[Amazing Hero’s Response…]

• Brooklyn, huh?  Maybe that would help explain it.

So, Matt, you think publishing a comic book you don’t like is a bigger crime that screwing Jack Kirby out of tens of thousands of pages of artwork?  Not to mention refusing to credit him for his role in creating all the dozens of characters you hold up as examples?  I guess I missed the declaration that made Matt Lewis and his taste in funny books the Ethical Center Of the Universe.

Fair warning to irate letter-writers: like the previous editors in this slot, I have no compunction about being downright nasty to those who are (a) rude, (b) arrogantly ignorant, or (c) personally insulting.  You pays your money, you takes you chance, and if you act too much like a jerk, you get clipped.  If that offends your tender sensibilities, there are plenty of other publications in which you can throw your fits without the mean ol’ editor telling you off.

“We need to talk to these guys,” we said, and dispatched Thom Powers to speak with Eastman and Laird about their past, their present projects, and their plans for the future. This interview was conducted in mid-October and transcribed by Powers. – MW

AH:Could you fill me in on your academic background, what you were doing before the Turtles, and how you know each other?

PETER LAIRD: I went to the University of Massachusetts from 1972 to 1976.  After that, I was a freelance illustrator and did editorial illustrations.  I met Kevin in 1972 * as a result of him running across a magazine with some of my work in it.

(*clearly a typo but I am presenting these interviews as they were printed – KE , October 2018)

AH: Were you working in comics at this time?

LAIRD: No, I was a great comics fan.  I hadn’t broken in at all, though.  I had done a few self-publishing things like mini-comics and actually went down to Marvel’s offices once – and was shown the door, basically.  Comics were always something I wanted to do; I just hadn’t found the right combination of circumstances yet.

KEVIN EASTMAN: I went to a couple of different schools for about a year.  On my own, I couldn’t afford to do much more than that, trying to keep up with the rent and so on.  But I started writing and drawing my own stories and selling some to Clay Geerdes’s Comix Wave and Brad Foster’s Goodies. After that, I ran into Peter and we started working on projects together.  First Fugitoid and then the Turtles.

AH:Can you talk about the evolution of the Turtles?

EASTMAN:  Your turn, Pete?  We take turns telling this story.

LAIRD: Well, we were living in Dover, New Hampshire, sharing a house.  One night we were sitting around with the tube on, just doodling away, and Kevin came up with this sketch of a turtle standing upright with a mask and a Nunchaku strapped to his forearm.  It was really goofy, so I had to do one of my own.  Then Kevin said if we can have one, then why not four, so we did a drawing of four with different weapons.  I inked that, and Kevin called them Ninja Turtles.  Then I said, “If ‘Ninja Turtles’, why not ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’?”

AH: Were you fed up with the whole teenage mutant trend at the time? Was this a result of reading 16 comics that were all the same?

EASTMAN: I’d agree with that.  We always read comics and, at that time, there were quite a few teenage superheroes.  It seemed all the superheroes were teens.

AH: If you were both really poor at this time, how did you come to produce this comic?

LAIRD: Well, we scraped up some money.  Kevin had some income tax money, about $500, and his uncle was generous enough to lend us another $700 or so. *

(*not entirely accurate, lol, but I am presenting these interviews as they were printed – KE , October 2018)

EASTMAN: My uncle was really into it.  We presented it to him like a business, showed him a mock-up cover, advertisements, stuff like that.  My uncle used to sell art supplies, and he’s always been fairly interested in what I was doing.  He was great about it.

AH: This was the first idea you felt strongly enough about to self-publish?

LAIRD: Well, we came up with Fugitoid first, but while we tried selling that to other companies, we always thought of doing Turtles ourselves.

AH: Did you think it would just be a one-shot?

LAIRD: We were open to do more, but it was really a one-shot to begin with.

EASTMAN: It was a one-shot because we weren’t sure if we could sell the first one.

AH: What were your first circulation figures?

LAIRD: Three thousand.  That’s how many we could afford to print, using every bit of money that we had at the moment.

AH:Was that just a case of picking up the phone and finding the first printer that you could?

LAIRD: Basically.  A lot of people ask us why we did the oversized version first.  That happened because of a mistake.  We went to the printer in New Hampshire and we brought this book of free TV facts.  I don’t know if they have them in your area.  They’re printed on newsprint and bound by staples or glue.  So we took this to the printer and said, “Can you do this?  We want a glossy cover and newsprint inside.”  Bu we didn’t tell him the size, and he just assumed that we wanted it like the TV facts book.

EASTMAN: It just goes to show how naive we were about the whole business.  We didn’t contact any distributors or anything.  We didn’t know how the business ran.  So we took out an ad in The Comics Buyer’s Guide and planned to sell the books one at a time through the mail.

LAIRD: We finally realized that it wasn’t going to work that way.  It took too long and we couldn’t afford full page ads in the CBG.

EASTMAN: Actually, it was from the full-page ad that distributors called us.

LAIRD: I think Longhorn of some Texas distributor called first.

AH:Didn’t Longhorn go out of business?

LAIRD: Yeah. [Laughter] We found that they were interested, but that they didn’t want to pay what we wanted.  We were asking 90 cents a book, and they wanted to pay 60 cents – a 60 percent discount, which is pretty standard.  Eventually, what we did is sell 90% of that print run at that discount.  They sold a lot faster than we thought; we expected to be sitting on them for a long time.

EASTMAN: We broke just about even on the price, too.  I don’t think we made any money at all, maybe just a couple hundred dollars.

LAIRD: We almost immediately went back to press with a second print run of 6000 using the money that had come back from the first printing.  There was quite a demand for [the book].  If we had been able to solicit for it, we probably could have been able to sell a lot more.  Like Kevin said, we were pretty naive, just stumbling around trying to figure out what to do.

AH:When did you really know that this was a success?

LAIRD: I think it was around #2.  That was around December, 1984.  We finished #2 and sent it off to the printers and our orders were 15,000.

EASTMAN: Peter and I were still working our regular jobs even after the first book came out.

AH:Were you doing other artwork or manual labor?

EASTMAN: Basically manual labor, the old standard, regular paycheck, 40 hours a week.  It let us pay the rent and still do drawing.

LAIRD: As it happened though, Kevin had moved back to Maine and I’d moved to Connecticut with my wife, so all the artwork for #2 was done through the mail.  That’s why it took us so long to get it out.

AH: How exactly do you two collaborate?

LAIRD: We come up with the story together, then Kevin starts working out the panel forms real rough and making script notes while I write the full script.  Then the thumbnails are enlarged and reproduced as rough pencils on the finished size paper.

EASTMAN: We both ink, a little here, a little there, so that we try to get half of each of us on every page.  Our styles are similar, with slight differences, and I think that they accent each other.

AH:I was told that you use a special kind of paper that gives your work its dark look.

LAIRD: Yes, the brand name is Craft-Tint.  It’s the same stuff that Roy Crane used for Buzz Sawyer, the newspaper strip.

EASTMAN: In black-and-white books you have your black line and white background.  We wanted to do something with gray tones, something different from the normal black-and-white books.  Cutting zipatone was out of the question.  You buy it in sheets with different patterns and then you keep adding different sheets to different characters.  Our process is really easy and it really gave us a different look.  It also stems from the Frank Miller parody. Inker Klaus Janson every once in a while would do a shade and I could never figure out how he’d do it.  Again, another sign of how naive we were.

I can remember when we talked with distributors about doing a second book.  They said, “You know, your book’s fine, it’s really picked up in sales, but the only way it will sell really well is if you go to color.”  That’s something that we couldn’t even think of – we were having enough trouble scraping up the money to put out the title in black-and-white.  Se we said we’d take our chances.  Now it’s gotten to the point where we could go to color if we wanted to – we have with the graphic novel – but people really like it the way it is.  A couple of years ago, [readers] said they would read anything but black and white.

AH: You did a color Turtles story with Richard Corben in issue #7.  How did that come about?

EASTMAN: That was the first color Turtles story [and was] a personal fantasy for me.  I was always a Corben fan.  It was received well, but people still like the black-and-white.

AH:Besides Corben, who are some of your other influences?

EASTMAN: Well, Corben’s the strongest.  Kirby, I always read Kirby.  Vaughn Bode is another one.  Currently, Frank Miller, for some of his layout and panel design.

LAIRD: I share with Kevin an influence from Kirby.  He’s the main man as far as comics are concerned.  I encountered Barry Smith’s Conan during my formative years.  Russ Manning, another inspiration.

AH:From what I understand, you were both mainly artists.  How did your writing develop?

EASTMAN: Even now, I have trouble considering myself as a writer.  Maybe I’m a real ambitious amateur.  I always wrote.  I used to read a lot of undergrounds.  It seemed like most of these people just wrote whatever came into their heads, which inspired me to write short stories.  Today we do really lengthy Turtles stories, which is fun, but I still love the short story, something totally removed and different.  I just go nuts and see what happens.

LAIRD: Like Kevin, I’ve never really thought of myself as a writer, but I’ve liked to tell stories since even before the Turtles.  Turtles was the first real intense storytelling experience that either of us had.  It’s been a real learning experience keeping characters straight and coming up with stories on a regular basis.

EASTMAN: I get a real charge out of doing the initial panel break-downs.  We’ll jam out a one page summary first, then do the planning, choreograph fight scenes.  Going back to Corben and the real cinematic way he looks at things, his presentation is a real influence.  Writing a story is like making a movie and choosing shots.

AH:Are you influenced by film?

EASTMAN: Oh, very much. One of the benefits of cartooning is we can doodle while we watch TV.  Now VCRs and video shops are so popular, I rarely go to the theater anymore.  I can watch zillions of movies at home while I ink or make notes or doodle on my lap board.  Peter watches at least as many films as I do, and it’s a big influence on our work.

LAIRD: It’s well known that there are a lot of similarities between film and comics.

EASTMAN: Comics is really a simplified director’s chair.

AH:Getting away from Turtles for a moment, what does the future hold for some of your other books?

LAIRD: Fugitoid may have a future, we may do a second issue.

EASTMAN: He’s kind of in limbo right now.  The Turtles take 110% of our time.  We’d love to do something with [Fugitoid], but at this point we’d have to find an artist that could handle it.

AH:How do you coordinate handling both the business end and the artistic end of Mirage?

EASTMAN: The business is real interesting.  We’re learning on both ends, helping each other along the way.  We’ve learned how to deal with distributors, do shows, and organize things, along with how to do the books more easily and which systems work better.  Right now, we’re probably as efficient as we’ve been.  We’ve just hired a business coordinator, a young woman named Diane Berube.  She’s organized us, helped keep us on track.

AH:Does the business ever interfere with your art?

LAIRD: Ooooooh.

EASTMAN: Oh, yeah, there’s a lot of stuff to keep track of.

AH:Do you regret that?  Would you rather be working for another company?

EASTMAN: No.

LAIRD: No. The benefits are far greater.

EASTMAN: Far Greater.

LAIRD: The freedom to make your own decisions without an editor hanging over our head.

EASTMAN: Pete will call me up and say, “We gotta go down to the office today to do ten different things.  At those times, I just want to stay at home because I’ll be in the middle of a story or something.  But I wouldn’t have it any other way.

AH:What about this First Comics project?

LAIRD: They’re reprinting our first three issues in color.

EASTMAN: We did the colors and there’s twelve new story pages.

AH:How did this arrangement come about?

EASTMAN: Well, we were doing a show in New York City and [First Comics’ Publisher] Rick Obadiah was there.  We had just done a Munden’s Bar story for Grimjack, and we went to lunch with Rick, who was talking about expanding the graphic novel line.  They’d just put out the Elrick graphic novel and Chaykin’s American Flag! [The project] seems like it’s moved fast, because the graphic novel itself will be out on the stands in November.

AH:Will that open any new markets for you?

LAIRD: First is getting into Waldenbooks and B. Dalton and other bookstores.

EASTMAN: We’re hoping that, if this goes over well, we’ll go right into the next series.

AH: How did your gaming book come about?

LAIRD: We were approached to do that.  Kevin Siembieda of Palladium Books had known about the Turtles and said that he’d be interested in developing a game and leasing the license.  We liked his approach, so we went with it.  He had someone write the game and we did the illustrations and an eight-page story.

EASTMAN: That first one is a real hot seller.  It turned out to be one of the most successful licensing ventures.  The second would be the Dark Horse miniatures of the Turtles.  It was neat to see three-dimensional figures of what we created on paper.

AH:What about this martial arts book?

LAIRD: We gave Solson the right to produce those.  The only connection we have is the characters.

AH:Are the drawings yours?

LAIRD: No.

EASTMAN: We didn’t do anything but the cover.  Actually, for the How To Draw the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles book, which was the first one, we did rough sketches, panel layouts, breakdowns, plus the black-and-white work for the cover.  Other than that, we’re pretty removed from the stuff.

AH: Any regrets about licensing and people messing with your characters?

EASTMAN: Not really.  There have been a few instances when it’s been disappointing, but nothing major.  Only disappointing in that we made a bad business move.

LAIRD: Whenever we license anything we keep a final say in our contract.

AH:So what’s the future for Mirage and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?

LAIRD: Well, it’s looking pretty bright.  Kevin will agree that we shouldn’t be too verbose about this, but you’ll be seeing Turtles in areas other than comics a lot more.  As for the Turtles comics themselves, there will be six books next year – four regular issues and two micro-series – and another graphic novel from First if the first one sells well.

EASTMAN: We’d like to keep expanding, doing outside things.  Like Michael Dooney’s Gizmo, which was really selling well for us.  Mike’s really turning out a quality comic.  Another artist that’s working for us is a gentleman by the name of Ryan Brown.  Brian is going to be producing a book called Rockola. He was doing a Bloom County-type strip in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He had a lot of success with that.  This will basically be the first rock-and-roll oriented comic book, so we’re pretty anxious to see how it’s received.

AH: Do you receive a lot of submissions?

EASTMAN: Well, recently.  Tell him why, Pete.

LAIRD: We’re doing a book called Turtle Soup next year which will be composed of Turtle stories written and drawn by other people.

EASTMAN: Giving them a free hand to do what they want with the Turtles.  To drop some names, Steve Bissette, Stan Sakai, Joshua Quagmire.

AH: You’re working with Quagmire?

LAIRD: Well he’s thinking about it.  He’s definitely doing something for Grunt.

EASTMAN: We’re doing another book kind of like Turtle Soup called Grunt. There’s still no release date for it yet.  It’s going to be all anthropomorphics, dealing with them as foot soldiers in different time periods.  Pieces of history, from the Civil War to cavemen to outer space.  We want to capture the theme of the foot soldier, the grunt, using animals.

AH:Are either of you martial artists?

LAIRD: Well, we’re both black belts in karate.

EASTMAN: He’s full of shit. [Laughter]

LAIRD: We’ve both had an interest in martial arts.  We’ve taken classes in karate and judo.

EASTMAN: When we did the first Turtles book, we did a bunch of research at the local library to make sure we were as authentic as we could be.

AH:By now, there’ve been surely half a dozen derivatives of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles…

EASTMAN: I think there’s something like 20.  The first one was kind of flattering.  I’m thinking in the sense that imitation is the greatest form of flattery.  I mean, we began with Miller and Kirby and used a lot of Miller parodies.  We started with our book the way Sim started with Cerebus. He was drawing like Barry Smith and used a lot of Barry Smith parodies, and it attracted a lot of attention.  We gave a sincere thanks to Miller and Kirby at the time, the two strongest influences.  So, anyway, the first parody [Adolescent Radioactive Black-Belt Hamsters] was flattering.  Then came another one, and another, and then it started to get old real quick.  It was great to see all these people getting together forming companies, and putting out their own comics because they really wanted to.  But I was kind of disappointed at the lack of originality.  If they’re gonna get together to do their own comic and they’re really sincere about it, that’s great, but they should really look for something original.  It started making us feel that people were putting this out because they just wanted to make a quick buck. On the other hand, there’s a book called Gnatrat, and it’s one of the best parodies I’ve seen, well-written, well-drawn.

LAIRD: This so-called black-and-white explosion is great because it allows a lot of other stuff, but through the open window comes stuff that’s embarrassing.  I think the market can only take so may black-and-white books.

AH:What do you think is the future of independents?

LAIRD: I think it’s a great future as long as the comic stores hold up the direct sales market, and I can’t see that they won’t.  Black-and-white comics from small companies are saleable; five years ago they were poison.  Now distributors know that they can make money on them.  The market will be there for some time if it can maintain this kind of frenetic expansion.

AH:What are some of your current favorite comics?

LAIRD: Personally, I really like Love & Rockets, Swamp Thing, Watchmen, and Cerebus.

EASTMAN:Dark Knight, Cerebus, Watchmen is out of sight, incredible stuff.

AH:Do you see your tastes changing as the variety of comics grows?  Does being impressed with a Watchmen inspire you somehow?

EASTMAN: I think so.

LAIRD: Not that Kevin and I will ever be able to write like Alan Moore, but it’s very heartening to see the market’s potential.  I can’t objectively judge the Turtles, Kevin and I are always trying to improve the writing and the drawing.  Whether or not we are, I’ll leave up to the reader.

EASTMAN: The thing about the stuff that Alan Moore and others are doing is that it’s a big stretch from Turtles. Turtles are fun and exciting, we both have a bunch of stories to tell with the Turtles.  But we have the desire to do something different, so we may alternate schedules on the book.  One of the really great things about the market today as opposed to ten years ago or even five years ago is that there’s such a variety of stuff.  There’s some very literate stuff, then there’s also things that have basic entertainment value.  Nervous Rex would be a good example, basic fun stuff that’s there for entertainment, whereas before, you just had Marvel and DC, middle-of-the-road stuff.  Now the market supports a whole variety of material.  There’s something for every taste.  You can’t really compare Love & Rockets and G.I. Joe [Laughter], but there’s obviously a market for each one.  It’s an exciting time to be working.

AH:Looking at the new CBG Price Guide, I see that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1 is going for $150 which is about what you made on the first issue.  How do you feel about the speculation going on?

LAIRD: I have mixed feelings about the speculation as it exists now.  When our book first came out, no one expected it to do anything.  Most of the speculation on it is genuine; there were only 3000 printed and the readership is up to 125,000 now.  It’s obviously a rare item.  Now there’s actually some companies manufacturing scarce items.  I think it’s real bogus and an insult to people’s intelligence to do a limited print run of a book specifically to make it “hot.”

EASTMAN: It really freaked us out that people were actually paying $25 or $30 for our book.  We’ve been reprinting the books regularly.  I think it’s great to attract an enormous amount of attention with speculation, but I want to know that people are reading Turtles and not just collecting it.  The reason we keep reprinting them is for people who buy comics like I buy comics.  You can see that some of my books are pretty beat up just because I’ve read them to death.  We keep them at an affordable price, so that anyone can see them and read them.

LAIRD: We are not purposefully keeping our print runs down.  That’s the furthest thing from our minds.  There’s some really incredible bogus things going on in the industry; if you read the ads in the CBG, you can see.  People are always speculating.  It’s a fact of life that when you have something in limited supply, the demand will go up regardless of the intrinsic value.  It’s a fact that there’s only 3000 copies [of #1].  That’s not a whole lot considering the buying power of the comics public.  When the book was out, there were ads that went from $20 to $30 to $40 and the multiple copies price went up.  I don’t think it was a result of the ads, but concurrent with them, the popularity was increasing. I don’t think it was artificial.  What was the question? [Laughter]

AH:So is your uncle paid back, Kevin?

EASTMAN: And then some.  He really made it possible.

LAIRD: We bought him a house in the Bahamas. [Laughter]

AH: Anything else you’d like to add?  You’ve got a soapbox here.

LAIRD: I think Marvel should give Jack Kirby his artwork back immediately if not sooner, and Jim Shooter and Stan Lee should go on TV and publicly apologize.

EASTMAN: I agree with Peter.  Not so harshly, but I see that it’s very wrong.  Everyone in the industry knows it’s wrong and can plainly see that the artwork should be returned.

AH:Would either of you work for Marvel if Jim Shooter called you up tomorrow?

EASTMAN: To be perfectly honest, there are certain Marvel characters that I would like to work on.  If he called tomorrow… I’m perfectly satisfied with the things we have going here.

LAIRD:  The characters that I’d like to do just happen to be owned by DC, so I can say definitely no.  Part of it is that I don’t have the time, but I’d also prefer an ethical revision of their policies before I do any work for them.

EASTMAN: Yeah, I can agree with that.

(See a reader’s response to this article here.)

 

MA Weapons
August ’87

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird
Published by Mirage Studios

One day in early 1984, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird were sitting around in Dover, New Hampshire, talking and drawing pictures. Eastman was joking and drew a turtle wearing a mask and holding a nunchaku. Laird liked it and drew his own version. Eastman called the new character, Ninja Turtle. Laird added his two cents by tacking on Teenage Mutant. Thus was born what has unquestionably become the most popular ninja comic to date – Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

How popular have the “Turtles” become? Well, one issue alone sold 135,000 copies. Also, another company (Solson) liked the idea so much they licensed the name and characters for a period of time, thus, confusing the comic-buying public with two magazines with the same name. The whole idea of turtles doing ninjutsu also set off a side craze – martial arts animals. Now there are ninja ducks and samurai walrus to name a few.

Laird, 33, co-writes and co-draws the turtles with Eastman, 33. The two get help from artist Michael Dooney. The difference between their ninja turtle comic and Solson’s is the storyline, Laird said. “Ours is strictly a fiction adventure story and Solson’s is a training manual.” The basic plot, according to Laird, goes something like this: A good ninja kills a bad ninja and moves to New York. While the good ninja trains, his pet rat (who is quite intelligent) watches his martial art moves very carefully. Eventually, the son of the bad ninja catches up with the good ninja and kills him and his wife. The bad ninja belongs to a clan of ninja called the Foot. With the good ninja dead, his pet rat is lift homeless, wandering on the street. Fate steps in when a truck carrying some kind of mysterious chemical accidentally drops a canister by the rat and a kid carrying four turtles. A “glowing ooze” from the canister covers the rat and the turtles, who begin to mutate and grow – eventually turning into Donatello, Raphael, Michaelangelo and Leonardo – the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The rat becomes their teacher and is called Master Splinter. Together they battle the forces of evil and bad ninja.

“Ninjutsu is a fascinating subject,” said Laird who has taken a few karate classes. “It has a mystique. Anybody can become a ninja if they try hard enough.”

For back issues or more information on the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, write to Mirage Studios, PO Box 417, Haydenville, Massachusetts 01039.

Raphael: The Interview

The Telegraph Wire – 1985
by Don Chin

Last year the comics industry witnessed the birth of a strange team of reptile vigilantes known as the TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES.

This very funny spoof of RONIN and DAREDEVIL caught on quickly with fans and the press, who both ate the idea up, much to the joy of the turtles, Donatello, Michaelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael, and creators Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird. TURTLES has become one of the best-selling independent comics ever and first printings of issue #1 are commanding up to $80 on the collector’s market.

Success has definitely made the turtles come out of their “shells” — rumor has it that the gang will film an American Express commercial, and a feature-length film directed by Steven Spielberg and George Lucas is in the works. (Just kidding! On a more realistic level, Laird and Eastman plan to release a series of TMNT buttons, possibly some t-shirts and a graphic novel, and are revealing the TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLE role playing game by Palladium Books this fall, which should complement the TURTLE lead miniatures that already inhabit the market!

I recently chatted with one of the ever-elusive turtles, RAPHAEL, who seems to be the best-known, if not the most psychotic of the bunch. I found him up on the roof, lounging in a lawn char soaking some rays while munching on a bowl of algae.

DON: thanks for joining us today, Raphael. Where are the other turtles?
RAPHAEL: Well, Mike’s upstairs watching Strange Brew on the VCR for the fiftieth time, Don’s modifying one of those radio-controlled jeeps into a a Mad Max machine, and Leo’s either in the cellar working out or reading the new issue of Rolling Stone, I don’t know which.

DON: How does it feel to be a comic book superstar?
RAPHAEL: Say what? I’m not so sure we’re superstars yet. I just hope people are enjoying our adventures.

DON: Why did you choose the sai [a Japanese fork-like weapon] as your specialty?
RAPHAEL: ‘Cause it makes for close-in fighting–and I like to see the sweat on the other guy’s eyebrows!

DON: How was your childhood?
RAPHAEL: Generally, wet. Seriously, I have three of the greatest brothers anyone could ask for… and Master Splinter is like the father we never had.

DON: Are you really trained as a ninja, or do you employ “stunt turtles” in you book?
RAPHAEL: I pity the man who says that! Splinter has trained us in the ways of ninjitsu since we were but young lads, about thirteen years.

DON: Any comments on your own micro-series book?
RAPHAEL: It’s a pretty wild story, with tons of action, featuring a new character named Casey Jones. If you think I’m crazy, wait ’til you see this guy!

DON: What do you enjoy doing in your spare time?
RAPHAEL: Swimming, sparring, working out, sleeping, and chasing small yard animals.

DON: How old are you? Height? Weight? Shoe size?
RAPHAEL: I’m 15 years old, four feet seven inches tall, 150 lbs., and I’ve never worn shoes.

DON: Any sexual preference?
RAPHAEL: You need a date…?

DON: Uh, okaaay! Ahem… do you find any advantages to being a turtle in a predominantly human environment? Any disadvantages?
RAPHAEL: Let’s see… well, I don’t have to wear a bathing suit when I go swimming. On the other hand, I have to do most of my swimming at night.

DON: How many thugs have you killed?
RAPHAEL: Several.

DON: How many thugs have you maimed?
RAPHAEL: More than several… and they know they’ve tangled with me.

DON: Please tell us your favorite musician, movie, and food.
RAPHAEL: Bruce Springsteen, The Terminator. As far as food goes, I’ll eat just about anything… but I love Michaelangelo’s stir-fry veggies!

DON: Any closing comments to our readers?
RAPHAEL: Keep your eyes peeled for the wildest adventures yet, coming in issues 4, 5, and 6 of our book! And watch out for FUGITOID, coming in August! Buy ’em… or else!

DON: Hey! I didn’t say you could plug your books in my column! You think I’d sell out that easily, kid?!?
RAPHAEL: GRRRRRRRRRR!

DON: Okay! Okay! I’ll plug ’em! I’ll plug ’em! Now would you please stop dangling me from the top floor of the building????? MAMAAAAAAAA!

**********

Remember… all floral arrangements, review items, kinky letters, and spare $100 bills should be sent to me c/o General Hospital, Room 408. NURRRRRSE!

************************************

Special thanks to Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman for all their assistance in arranging this interview and for scooping me off the pavement.

1985

I recall seeing an ad for the first issue of TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES. The art and lettering were a perfect parody of RONIN, while the concept managed to satirize all the current trends in comics. However, I figured it was such a clever idea that it couldn’t possibly sustain a whole book. Worst of all, I didn’t snap it up when it appeared in the local comics shops. My mistake. In less than a year, the first printing of #1 has increased in value over 3,000%! Now in its fourth issue, the book continues to be a hot topic of conversation (and controversy) among fans, dealers, and speculators across the country. As the creators rested from a hectic day of being convention guests in Atlanta, we talked about their phenomenal success.

LAMAR WALDRON: You’re both basically artists, right?
KEVIN EASTMAN: Uh huh.
LAMAR: Okay, so who dies the writing?
PETER LAIRD: We both do.
KEVIN: It’s a split. A lot of people, that’s the first thing they say when the come up, “All right, you draw, right? And you write?” But we share the chores, almost fifty-fifty right down the line. We talk out the plot together, we sit down and talk about the idea, what we want to do with the book. Then I’ll do some small rough roughs, page layouts, and Peter and I will go over them together. Peter will pick out the ones that I gross him out with. He’ll say, “No, this is terrible,” or “This is good, keep this.”
LEMAR: He picks out the ones you gross him out with – or he rejects those?
KEVIN: Oh, sometimes he pick the…
PETER: I mention them, and then we talk about them.
KEVIN: Basically, we’re very civilized.
LEMAR: Peter, do you just give Kevin feedback on his layouts, or do you do layouts, too?
PETER: Essentially, it’s worked out so that Kevin does the layouts for the book. Well, I did the first seventeen pages of the second book – but Kevin has done the layouts for everything else, including RAPHAEL, the one-shot micro-series.
KEVIN: Once we’ve agreed on everything, we both share the chores of actually enlarging the pages to their full size.
LAMAR: Do you use an opaque projection for that?
KEVIN: No, it’s all freehand. We redraw all the pages totally and we both share in the penciling activities. Then I do the lettering, although I’m afraid to admit it – I think my lettering’s terrible. Then Peter does all the finished scripting. He fine-tunes all the writing.
LAMAR: So, there’s no typed script, or anything like that? You basically work from the layouts?
KEVIN: Yeah. Peter finishes the writing. As for the inking, we do exactly fifty-fifty of that. If I start drawing a page, I’m only allowed to draw half of that, then Peter finishes the other half.
PETER: Just so we have an even mixture of both of us.
LAMAR: Are you serious?
KEVIN: Totally.
LAMAR: I mean, – so every page…
PETER: Oh, no, it’s not that set in concrete. There are certain pages that Kevin’s inked totally and there are certain pages that I’ve inked totally.
LAMAR: But would it be safe to say that on every page in every book, each of you has made some contribution?
PETER: With one or two exceptions, yes. In most cases, it’s fifty-fifty.
KEVIN: It really is. We like to have a little bit of each of us on the page.
LAMAR: Did you have any precedent for this kind of partnership? Did this just evolve, or did you model this after some collaborative team that you were aware of, such as Frank Frazetta and Al Willimanson, or Stan Lee and Jack Kirby?
KEVIN: I think it evolved.
PETER: Yeah. Basically, we just started working together and knew we wanted to collaborate – it just seemed like this was the way to go. We’re each writers and artists, and we didn’t want any separation of effort.
LAMAR: What happens when one wants to do something that the other doesn’t like? How do you resolve disputes?
PETER: We argue about it – well, generally we discuss it first and then, if it gets to the point of arguing about it, we’ll argue.
KEVIN: It comes down to a compromise. I’ll give a little, then he’ll give a little. We work out something we both think is fair.
PETER: Here’s an example. On page nine in the first book, there’s a full-page city scent that Kevin drew. When we first did the book in pencil form and I saw it, I said, “Well, it’s a nice drawing, but I don’t think it fits. I think it slows down the action and I’d rather not have it in there.”
KEVIN: Of course, I felt it was essential for the storytelling because in the first part of the book they meet the Purple Dragons –
PETER: and there’s a long fight scent and this is afterwards –
KEVIN: – and I felt that this was necessary to break it up, to give the reader breathing space.
LAMAR: So you won. Why is that, because you’re taller?
KEVIN: No, I had a lot of bigger friends who could rough him up and make threatening phone calls. (Laughter)
PETER: No. Essentially, Kevin was adamant. Eventually, I agreed – I wouldn’t say under duress, but a little reluctantly. But after it was all done, I said, “Hey, that’s great.” I love it now.
KEVIN: It was one of those things, you know, when you feel so strongly about it. It was an odd thing – I just felt that I had to have that page in there. That’s the only one we’ve had any real argument over.
LAMAR: I think it’s really interesting the way you guys work together. How did you come to meet each other? Is there any truth to the rumor that you were both raised by Gypsies and were separated at birth?
PETER: None whatsoever.
KEVIN: Peter was, but Mom never missed him. (Laughter.) She was glad we got rid of him, he ate too much cheese –
LAMAR: How long have you known each other?
PETER: Three years…?
KEVIN: Yeah, it’s been about three years since we met. Peter lived in Northampton, Massachusetts. He was working as a freelance artist there, and I was living in Amherst with my girlfriend, who was going to school there at the time.
LAMAR: You are from Massachusetts originally, then?
KEVIN: No, I’m originally from Maine.
LAMAR: Oh, Maine – I thought that was a Massachusetts accent.
KEVIN: Maine, too. After Massachusetts, it all gets the same. It only gets worse – more French, the closer you get to the Canadian border.
LAMAR: So you met three years ago…
KEVIN: It’s kind of a cute story, the way we met. I was working at a supermarket bagging groceries at the time. One night, I was riding home from work on the bus, bored to tears and saw this little magazine on the floor. It was called SCAT – it was some comics magazine. So, I picked it up and started thumbing through it. One of the more outstanding artisans in it was Peter Laird. I was so excited to find out that this book was printed in Northampton, which was the next town over. So I went over to the offices there and brought my stuff – I hadn’t published yet or anything – trying to get to do some work for them, and they said, “Geez, you draw a lot like this guy Peter Laird.” So they gave me his address and I wrote him a letter. He called me up a couple of days later. I went over and walked into this third-floor studio that he had. The first thing I saw was this original Jack Kirby art page and we hit it off from then on. We’ve been the best of friends since.
LAMAR: Going back farther that that – how did you guys come to be interested in comics in the first place?
PETER: I’ll take that. Well, I’ve always enjoyed reading. I’m a fairly voracious reader and I’ve always enjoyed artwork, and the combination of the two in comics has always been really appealing to me. So I’ve just read them, since I was a kid – especially since high school. Oh, yeah – Jack Kirby was a seminal influence on my drawing.
LAMAR: What were your favorite comics when you were a kid?
PETER: You know, I can’t remember when I was a really young child, but when I was in high school it was the Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR, then when he switched over to DC, doing the NEW GODS, MR. MIRACLE, THE FOREVER PEOPLE, KAMANDI, THE DEMON, those things.
LAMAR: Kirby sounds like one of your big idols.
PETER: Yeah. And around the same time I also became aware of Barry Smith and his cutting loose with CONAN. That was something really different. I enjoyed that a lot.
LAMAR: And Kevin – how about you, for comics?
KEVIN: Comics when I was young? Besides the Kirby books – KAMANDI being my utmost favorite Kirby book at that time – I used to read a lot of the war comics –
LAMAR: Kubert?
KEVIN: Yeah, Kubert, very much so. I really enjoyed his stuff. It was more like the war comics than the superhero stuff at first.
LAMAR: You say you pretty much liked the Kirby, Smith, Kubert stuff – did these people have any influence on the work you’re doing right now? And if not, what are some of the influences, whether artists, writers, film makers, on what you’re trying to do on the TURTLES?
(Dead silence.)
PETER: Dead silence.
KEVIN: Dramatic pause.
PETER: I can’t say that there’s any really direct influence – I’m trying to think –
LAMAR: Well, did you ever go through the phase that Barry Smith did with Kirby when he did his Kirby imitation until he developed his own style?
PETER: Sort of, yeah. I was never as good a Kirby imitator as Smith was. I tried to take some of the essence of what Kirby was – I don’t know how successful I was, but… I can’t really say I imitated him. I tried to emulate him, maybe, but not imitate him so much.
LAMAR: Is there anyone else that has an influence on the work that you try to do, the way you tell a story?
PETER: It’s really diverse and diffused, the influences that I’ve had. I can’t really specify one in particular.
LAMAR: How about you, Kevin?
KEVIN: Me, personally? As far as influences, I’ve been very influenced by Rich Corben, Vaughn Bode, and Kirby. I was influenced by them in the way that they just had such a great, great way to tell a graphic story. They really strove so hard for the different angles, they tried so hard to make the story really interesting. That’s inspired me a lot to really try hard to do something different, just to try different things, to be really experimental – because, you know, the comics world has such a wide range of things that are being done that it’s fun to find a slot somewhere and really go crazy.
LAMAR: So you just want to be as loose as possible and try as many different –
KEVIN: Yeah, be really experimental. To have someone look at one of our books and say, “Gee, I haven’t seen that done in a while.” “I’ve never seen that done, ” or, “It’s something really different.” We really try hard to have a different product.
LAMAR: Did either of you guys go to art school, or have any kind of artistic training?
PETER: I went to the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.
LAMAR: Did you get a B.F.A.?
PETER: Yeah, a Bachelor of Fine Arts in printmaking.
LAMAR: Did you find it helpful at all in what you’re doing now?
PETER: Only in that I had to draw a lot more. Life drawing, stuff like that. I learned some techniques that have been helpful, but I should have gone to a more focused school for commercial art or design, because it was all fine art – and, while fine art is fine, it wasn’t really what I was interested in.
LAMAR: It gave you names for the characters in your comics.
PETER: This is true. Janson’s ART HISTORY.
KEVIN: In junior high, early high school, my father used to draw a lot. We signed up together to take some life drawing classes, drawing models and stuff. I did go to art school for a whole semester at the Portland School of Art when I got out of high school. The Portland School of Art is a wonderful school and I really enjoyed it, but it wasn’t a state-funded school and it was really expensive. I was living on my own at the time and I just couldn’t afford it. So, basically, I just kept at it on the side. I still take life drawing classes when I can. I’m always learning all the time, but I’ve still got a long way to go.
LAMAR: Who came up with the idea for the TURTLES? Who’s guilty?
KEVIN: Once again, it was like we do our plots, like we do everything – it couldn’t have come about if we didn’t feed off each other. It started one night when we were fooling around, working on a book called FUGITOID together –
LAMAR: FUGITOID?
KEVIN: Yeah. It’s about a robot. It’s going to be published later this year. But it was late, we were tired, and just kind of joking around, and I had this idea for this turtle character with this huge mask on and nunchucks strapped to his arms. It was just kind of bizarre. We giggled about it. Peter did his version of it and it went on and on. We got carried away and said, “Geez, why just one? Why don’t we do a group of four?” And so I did a sketch of the four Turtles together and I said, “Hey, this is great! We’ll call them Ninja Turtles!” – just joking – and Peter said, “No, why don’t we call them Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?” So it was really inspired by both of us.
LAMAR: Latter day Seigel and Shuster, eh?
PETER: Yeah. I hope we don’t end up like those two guys.
LAMAR: Which brings us to the next point. How did you go about getting it from an idea stage to a published comic?
PETER: Well, we did send out our FUGITOID story. We had done five-page segments which we were trying to sell as a backup story.
KEVIN: Yeah, we were just dying to get published, anything we could. We just wanted to draw comics so badly.
LAMAR: So you sent it to Marvel and DC?
PETER: No. All the alternatives. Pacific was still functioning at the time.
LAMAR: And nobody picked it up?
PETER: No. We got some nice rejection letters, but we were still burning with the desire to do a book, to get it published. We had this idea we were tossing around. We had worked out a whole story to explain how they are teenage mutants and ninjas and turtles, so we did it.
LAMAR: You mean you did the whole book without a publisher first?
PETER: Right. We decided by hook or by crook that we would see it in print. We had lots of discussions about how many we should print, because obviously it was going to be a self-published venture. We decided to borrow the money from Kevin’s Uncle Quentin –
KEVIN: And use all my income tax money.
PETER: His income tax money, and a little money that we had left over in the bank.
LAMAR: Had either of you ever published anything before?
PETER: I had self-published a few things. I did a calendar of the gods with my brother, which had a mythological deity for each month of the year. And I did a comic – a really crude one – a couple of years earlier.
LAMAR: So you had done a little self-publishing…
PETER: Yeah. We just had to get this book out. The other thing was that there was this local convention we had gone to, and there was going to be another one in four months, and we knew that we had to get something out to sell there, to premier, and whatnot. Se we did. We went ahead and found a local printer in Dover, New Hampshire, where we were living at the time, and we printed three thousand of them for us. Then, with some trepidation, we tried to sell them.
LAMAR: What was the response initially, before it became a hot seller? Did you contact distributors like Bud Plant and Glenwood?
KEVIN: Did we? No, I –
PETER: Yeah, we did actually, even before the book was printed. (To Kevin:) Remember, we did those press releases – the four-page ones with sample artwork? We sold about half the print run before the book actually came back from the printer to distributors – Bud Plant, and I think Glenwood picked up about a third of them, something like that, and then Capital bought some. When we got the books back from the printer, they were all sold.
LAMAR: The whole run?
PETER: Yeah, the whole run of three thousand. In fact, we sold all of them within a month. They were all out of the house. Then we had to do a second printing of six thousand.
LAMAR: Did the response surprise you?
KEVIN: Very, very much. We argued for the whole time we were drawing the book about just how many we should print. Peter’s like, “Let’s do five thousand!” and I’m like, “This is my money and I borrowed money from my family to do it. Let’s do a thousand and hope.” I figured that if we could sell five hundred books and make our money back, and just keep the rest to give to friends of whatever, then we were doing good.
LAMAR: Were you guys smart enough to keep back copies of the first printing of #1?
PETER: I wish we had been about fifty percent smarter, to tell you the truth. We didn’t hold back as many as we should. We were just so glad to sell them.
KEVIN: What is was, was the money didn’t really matter – just enough to break even. That we had finally published our own book, we were so tickled with that.
PETER: That we were even able to make our money back and break even was a real rush, because we fully expected to sell maybe five hundred of them and sit on the rest of them for the remaining time.
LAMAR: It’s probably the most successful self-published comic to come along in several years, since CEREBUS. What do you two think is responsible for the fantastic success?
KEVIN: What do we think accounts for it? I’d love to say, “Oh, they love our artwork,” but a lot of people say it’s just the need for something different. They really enjoy it because it’s different. A lot of people come up and say, “I heard the name of this book and I had to have it.” The name is what brings the people to the book. Like I said before, what we want to shoot for is to keep it different, offbeat – something that will keep people coming back. I love my X-MEN, and I love my CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS, I like all those, but it’s nice to get away and maybe read the TURTLES, just for something different.
LAMAR: Do you think the reasons are pretty much the same, Peter?
PETER: I also think very strongly that the name is important, because so many people who don’t even read comics laugh when they hear the name. They chuckle, there are a lot of people for whom it does, and they go out and buy the book just to see what the hell it’s all about.
KEVIN: Usually, when you tell somebody the name of the book, it’s like, “What?!” It’s the first reaction. Like, “Yeah, we draw TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES,” and ninety-nine times out of a hundred the answer is, “What?!”
LAMAR: The name does provoke a laugh. The contents, on the other hand, are played pretty seriously. Is it intended as a serious dramatic tragedy of modern turtles in a struggle for existence, or is it a little tongue-in-cheek?
(Long pause.)
KEVIN (to Peter): Umm… tongue-in-cheek to start?
PETER: Yeah… I mean, obviously the first issue was a parody of some very specific elements…
LAMAR: Like – ?
PETER: Oh, Frank Miller, RONIN…
KEVIN: The teenage mutants, then the ninja craze, and then the animal aspect of, oh, like CEREBUS, the crowd that CEREBUS draws.
LAMAR: Was there an intentional CEREBUS parody in there as well?
PETER: Only in the most oblique sense. It wasn’t direct at all.
KEVIN: No. Sim parodied CONAN and Barry Smith when he did his book, like we parodied Miller and his DAREDEVIL and RONIN when we did our book, and we were maybe hoping to achieve the same type of notice.
LAMAR: So it started out as a parody the first issue, and now you’re on your fourth issue. Is it still parody?
KEVIN: Definitely.
PETER: The parody elements in the book, as you notice, aren’t really strong. I mean, they’re not intense. I don’t know if you’ve read that Harvard Lampoon parody of THE LORD OF THE RINGS –
LAMAR: BORED OF THE RINGS?
PETER: Yeah. That’s like every sentence is dense with parody. I think that only works if you’re very, very clever. I personally don’t feel clever enough to maintain a consistently wonderful parody all the way through.
KEVIN: There were some parodies just in the style it was done in, like that DAREDEVIL thing in the origin. You know, where the person gets hit in the eyes with this radioactive ooze. That’s a parody. But the story is an original idea. We just want to keep getting more original.
PETER: I like to feel that the humor is kind of incidental in the story. There are little flashes of it. The story is pretty straightforward. When you read it, you have to – well, I don’t know if you have to, but you should – no, I won’t even say you should – but you might chuckle at the fact that these protagonists are turtles, but they’re going through the motions of this very straightforward adventure story and, at least to my mind, there’s a certain amount of humor in that.
KEVIN: It’s underlying humor.
PETER: Yeah.
KEVIN: Hidden.
PETER: I think too many parodies aren’t successful because they’re so crammed with parody, so intense, like that BORED OF THE RINGS book. I’m not saying that it isn’t successful, but it’s heavy handed, just too much parody.
LAMAR: It also sounds like you’re moving somewhat in the same direction that Dave Sim took eventually. If you mention to most people today that CEREBUS started out as a parody of CONAN and Barry Smith, they’d say “What?!”
PETER: That’s true. The book will evolve. It already has since the first issue – you couldn’t say that #2 or #3 is a parody of anything really specific.
LAMAR: What are your future plans for the book.
PETER: Megasuccess. (Laughter.) No, just kidding.
LAMAR: “No?” You won’t take it if it’s thrust on you?
KEVIN: Naw. If it comes –
PETER: – total refusal.
….
KEVIN: Our plans for the future are to just keep enough people buying it so that we can keep drawing it.
PETER: And keep people entertained by it. If it ceases to be entertaining, it probably will cease to sell and we’ll have to go do something else.
KEVIN: We’ll have to go back to cooking.
PETER: Cookin’ lobsters and makin’ sandwiches.
LAMAR: Is it on a regular schedule at this point?
PETER: Yes, there should be two more regular issues of the book this year. We have the FUGITOID book scheduled for mid-year – or, actually, September – and two microseries, one-issue series. The first was RAPHAEL, and then there’s going to be a special Christmas story featuring MICHAELANGELO.
KEVIN: It looks like we’ve got a book coming out every two months from now ’til the end of the year. The FUGITOID book, which comes out in August, is going to continue into issues #5 and #6 of the TURTLES.
LAMAR: Smart planning. Do you think we’ll ever see the TURTLES’ SECRET WARS? (Laughter.)
PETER: Funny you said that! Read issues #5 and #6!
KEVIN: Yeah!
PETER: No, really – there’s a certain element of similarity in those issues.
LAMAR: I guess that gives your readers something to look forward to in #5 and #6. How about you guys? Any future plans beyond the TURTLES and FUGITOID?
KEVIN: I want to do an issue of DAREDEVIL. Just to do something different, as long as it pertains to drawing. I’d love to try a mainstream book. I want to get a year or so under my belt so that I’ve got the experience to be as good, to do a nice one.
PETER: I think you’d do a great DAREDEVIL.
KEVIN: Yeah. Good splattering.
LAMAR: How about you, Peter? What are your goals?
PETER: I’m having fun with the TURTLES and I want to continue doing them, but I would like to continue what I was doing before the TURTLES. Not the things that I was doing commercially, drawing vegetables and boring stuff like that, but more fantastic things – in the realm of the fantastic. I would like to do a revival of Jack Kirby’s DEMON character, Etrigan.
LAMAR: By the way whose idea was all the Duo-tone board? That’s not seen much in comics any more.
PETER (to Kevin): It was your idea. You saw some of that stuff that I had and then you – wasn’t that it? You saw a couple of samples of it?
KEVIN: Yeah. I love the effect. We knew from the beginning that we would only be able to afford a black-and-white book and we wanted to do something that would make this black-and-white book look different from the others, something other than regular pen-and-ink, and the tones were a perfect outlet.
LAMAR: I thought you were Roy Crane fiends. The BUZ SAWYER approach.
KEVIN: That’s some beautiful stuff, it really is.
LAMAR: What are you up to circulation-wise on the combined printings for #1, #2, and #3?
KEVIN: Combined printings of the very first issue? Thirty-five –
PETER: First printing of #1 was three thousand, second printing of #1 was six thousand, and the third printing is going to be thirty-five thousand.
LAMAR: Thirty-five thousand?
KEVIN: Yeah. Get this – first printing of #3, we’re up to fifty-thousand books.
PETER: And #2’s first printing was fifteen thousand, the second was thirty thousand.
LAMAR: That’s pretty impressive. You’re outselling CEREBUS right now.
PETER: I guess we are. The circulation of CEREBUS is twenty-something thousand. We’ve got forty-two thousand of the #3s sold already, pre publication. I have a feeling that in the coming months we’ll probably get some back orders for maybe another ten thousand. I’m not trying to brag, that’s just the way it seems to be working out. With the #2s we still have back orders. I hate talking casually about it, because this time last year we were just finishing inking the pages for this book – and in no way, shape, or form did we ever imagine that it would be this successful. It blows our minds.
KEVIN: For that matter, to have been paid to come down to Atlanta to do a convention was never even thought of as a possibility.
LAMAR: Hopefully, it will be the first of many for you. Have the TURTLES appeared in other countries yet? Europe, maybe?
PETER: Not published, but I did send a couple of the review copies of the first one after it was published to this Swedish fanzine GRAPHIC DREAMS and they did a review of it, a four-page review. They sent us a copy a couple of months ago of this big review in Swedish. We were even mentioned on the cover.
KEVIN: We got somebody to interpret it for us –
PETER: That was great. This guy who lived in Sharon, Connecticut, translated it.
LAMAR: And they said you were better than Ingmar Bergman, right?
PETER: Yeah, you must have read it. (Laughter.) Just kidding. It was neat, though.
LAMAR: Well, this seems to have exhausted all my copious notes here – is there anything else either of you would like to add?
KEVIN: TURTLES COME ALIVE IN ’85! That’s our motto for this year, thanks to Peter’s brother, Bruce.
PETER: My brother Bruce has to be one of the most devoted fans. He sends us a postcard almost every day. He does these little collages where he cuts pictures out of the book and makes Xeroxes of them and colors them in and sends them to us. Just to keep us going.
LAMAR: Sounds like a real devoted fan. When do they let him out of the asylum? (Laughter.) How old is he?
PETER: He’s thirty-four. It sounds a little stranger than it actually is.
KEVIN: He is our Number One fan. It’s very inspiring to have him behind us.
PETER: He thinks it’s neat and wants to encourage us.
LAMAR: Kevin, your Uncle Quentin, who provided some of the initial cash outlay for #1, must be delighted with the success of the TURTLES.
KEVIN: Yeah. He got his bucks back, but it was more important to him to see us get off the ground. When we asked to borrow money from him, he said, “I’ll give you the money. When you come up with a package, I’l like to see it. All I require is that you give me the money back that I gave you – ”
PETER: A no interest loan.
KEVIN: No interest. My uncle is a real nice guy. So we brought him over to the house and showed him what we had done, what we wanted to do. We had everything thought out, all the advertising, the book itself – we made up photocopies of it to show him what is was going to look like. He wrote us a check and said, “Go for it.”
….

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Enjoy!

OnOff

Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Wednesday, September 24, 1986

By TIM ROCHE
Star-Telegram writer

Kevin Eastman of the Eastman-Laird team does most of the talking. while Peter Laird of Laird-Eastman does most of the thinking.

Eastman and Laird illustrate, write and publish a small press comic book that stars four Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles who use martial weaponry to rid the planet of crime.

“I’m a blabbermouth,” Eastman insists. “I’m really shy but not as shy as he is.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” Laird said. “I do the talking when it’s just us.”

The creators chatted with readers and signed autographs inside previous comic book issues Sunday as part of a three-day promotion at the Fort Worth-Dallas area Fantastic Worlds Bookstores.

“Did you like this one?” Eastman asked one youngster who replied with a silent nod. “Me too. It’s one of my favorites.”

Another Eastman-Laird fan was a bit more inquisitive. “When is your next issue coming out? How’d you learn to draw like that?” the youngster asked.

“In about two weeks,” answered Eastman. “It just takes practice.”

The questions, the gleaming eyes and the expressions of adoration were nothing new for the comic sketching duo.

Since their first edition hit the stands in May 1984, Eastman and Laird have known nothing else. They were a success from the very beginning. A role-playing game, a line of miniature figurines, a series of Turtle martial arts manuals and a multi-million dollar movie proposal have been the result of what started out to be a shot in the dark and feared to be a shot in the arm.

After seven or eight publishing companies didn’t like some of their earlier work and said so in several rejection letters -which now hang along the walls of Eastman’s and Laird’s office in downtown Northampton, Mass. – they decided not to give up hope.

In December 1983, Eastman retreated to his pad and pencil late one night and sketched a masked turtle armed with nunchuks. He handed the drawing to Laird, his housemate at the time, who made a few revisions. They drew three other turtles identical to the first one, came up with a name for them and launched their dreams into reality.

Anticipating the worst from publishers, they decided to print and market the Turtles’ first edition themselves with a small loan and Eastman’s entire income tax return. They could afford only 3,000 copies, which now are valued at $75 each.

We thought we would never get rid of them,” Eastman said. “We figured we would have to burn them in the fireplace.

“But,” Laird noted. “they flew out of the house. They were gone in three weeks.”

Each of their eight editions has outsold its predecessor, and more than 105,000 copies of their latest work has been circulated.

“It doesn’t seem real,” Eastman said. “The feeling lately is that we don’t have much control of our life anymore.

“It’s Turtles, Turtles, Turtles. But that’s all we care about right now.

For a long time, we wanted to draw comics so bad, and now we`re doing just what we always wanted to do,” he said.

Laird acknowledged his agreement by shaking his head and continuing to draw a Turtle to sell for $l to one of readers who had gathered to hear their story of triumph.

They seem as different as night and day. Eastman uses his right hand and Laird is left-handed. But inside – where they say it really counts – they are much the same. In fact, that essentially is how they became acquainted.

In 1982, Eastman was riding a bus home from his job bagging groceries when he began reading a small, locally produced comic book that he had found on the floor.

When he got home, Eastman gathered up his drawings and hurried off to offer his services to the comic book’s editors, who said they were not interested but told him he should meet Laird, an artist with the same style.

Eastman wrote Laird a letter. Later they met, compared drawings and have been friends – and partners – ever since. As youngsters growing up in middle-class families, they often doodled away their time, both at home and school. In spite of fatherly advice to seek more secure jobs, they proceeded with their desires to become professional artists.

Now the two artists arise from their beds shortly after dawn, spend much of the morning in their studios, tend to business at their office in the afternoon and return to the drawing board for three or four more hours.

With the recent addition of an office manager and a licensing agent to their limited office staff, Eastman and Laird have been able to devote more time to writing and drawing the key to their success, they said.

“We want to give the readers exactly what they want. They don’t want superheroes romping around in skin-tight clothing anymore. They want excitement and adventure,” Eastman said.

Apparently, their line of thinking has been accurate. The Ninja Turtles, a parody of Conan the Barbarian and Ronin comic characters, has been parodied itself, including Preteen Dirty Gene Kung-Fu Kangaroos, Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters and Mildly Microwaved Pre-pubescent Kung Fu Gophers.

Despite the competition. Ninja Turtles has been dominant in the Fort Worth-Dallas area, said Bob Wayne, President of Fantastic Worlds, Inc.

“The appeal of what Eastman and Laird are doing is different,” Wayne said Sunday. “It reflects something personal that everyone can relate to.”

Ben Keenan, a 13-year-old Southlake eighth-grader, spends $20 a week for comic books to add to his collection of 700-plus.

While he admits to being an avid Turtles fan, he also likes to read other “silly” and “funny” pieces of entertainment.

One of his favorites: The adventures of “Peter Porker” a crime-fighting pig with super-hero powers similar to Spiderman.

“I just like to read them,” Keenan said, adding that he hopes to capitalize on his investment later.

“That’s what I tell mom,” he said. “I am going to sell them.”

** Me KE – “this article is so full of inaccuracies its not even funny – well it kinda is so i hope you enjoy”!

The Paper
March 7 – April 3, 1985

by Kirby Miller The Yellow Kid

OK, fans. You all know the usual run of comic book fantasia, right? No, not Donald Duck or Charlie Brown or Archie Andrews. I’m talking about The Incredible Hulk, Wonder Woman, Silver Surfer, Shazam, Batman. You know, the whole pantheon of superachievers.

They’ve been around quite awhile, haven’t they, evil battling, time traveling, mindscaping? Why, they even team up these days to form Justice Leagues and other assorted comic consortia, and they do mini-series, guest shots in each others’ mags, television shows and
breakfast cereals.

Well, every time you run around, these guys are spinning off another intergalactic distant cousin – a new mutation for the gallery. With small publishers and satirists getting into the act, we’ve got OmegaMen, New Teen Titans, DNAgents, Normalmen, Ranxerox, Ambush Bug, Captain Canuck, Groo the Wanderer, Muppet Babies, Flaming Carrot, Wonderbunny – the list goes on. The list is growing. There’s even a number generated entirely on a MacIntosh computer. Comicons draw more conventioneers every year. Collectors are going berserk. Shops are popping up all over (like the one called, “My Mother Threw Mine Away.” Love that name.) And meanwhile, two guys in Sharon, Connecticut, have started this business with
turtles.

That’s right, turtles. ‘Course, these aren’t your ordinary, hare-beating, slow-and-steady-wins-the-race tortoises. Officially, they are Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. They wear masks, wield sais and nunchakus, and “strike hard and fade away into the night.” Once box turtles of little distinction, they have been transformed by freak exposure to chemical goo and the teachings of a martial arts master rat (that’s right, rat), into human-size defenders of truth and justice. They put honor first, and terrapin terror into the hearts of the lawless. Now you see them, now you don’t.

The authors of this shell game are Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, known collectively as Mirage Studios, and they couldn’t be happier about it. Kevin is a former art student and longtime fanzine follower with a protean flair for color illustration. Peter has a degree in printmaking from UMass in Northampton, a history of clever cartooning for magazines and newspapers, and an entrepreneurial itch. Both of them have been caught up with comics as far back as they can remember.

While still in high school, Kevin began sending drawings to magazines like Comixwave and Goodies. “No money, though, ” he says wistfully. “Just contributor copies of the magazine.” With paying illustration jobs few and far between. he ended up working a lot of restaurant jobs to keep bread in the basket while he sketched and painted and dreamed of the big time.

Peter worked in a comic book store for a couple of years after UMASS, freelancing to keep one foot in the mainstream and wondering if he’d ever have an opportunity to make a living at his kind of art. “I ran my own comic shop in Northampton for three years – in a former shoe shine shop, a 4′ x 15’ hole in the wall. Interesting and better than working for someone else, but just keeping the inventory straight didn’t leave much time or energy for creativity.”

Then they met, Kevin was staying in Northampton while his girlfriend finished her senior year. One day on the bus he found a battered copy of “Scat,” a local comix pub, lying on the floor. Some of the illustrations reminded him of his own work. He got the artist’s address and phone number from the publisher and arranged a meeting. When Peter Laird answered the door, behind him was a wall poster by Frank Kirby, one-time Marvel Comics maven and one of Kevin’s “heroes.” One of Peter’s, too, as it turned out.

“When I saw that poster,” says Kevin, “I knew.” Karma. Kismet.
Kindred spirits. For years they had been fascinated by the minutiae of the comix biz, with scarcely a soul to share their enthusiasm, as artists, for actually creating their own. So they talked and enthused. When they moved – Kevin to Maine, Peter to New Hampshire with his wife Janine – they kept in touch and got together every so often for creative jam sessions. And in April,1983, they formed Mirage
Studios.

“We were looking at a color blow-up Kevin had done of one of my robot drawings,” says Peter, “and thinking how well we worked together, and we just decided: ‘Why not?”‘ After a few false starts and a pile of publishers’ pink slips, and still collaborating by mail and commute, they stumbled on Turtles.

“We should do a story on Ninja Turtles,” said Kevin.

“Better yet, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” said Peter.

“Ha! Let’s do it!” said Kevin.

“What a guy,” said Peter.

(Me: KE** – not exactly what we said to the reporter but anyways – LOL)

This time. they decided, they weren’t going to roll their pearls past the swine of the publishing houses. With Kevin’s tax refund and a loan from his uncle, they swallowed hard and printed 3,000 copies of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1 in black ink on newsprint. With customary daring, they added a second color to the cover, on glossy paper.

“I was worried about printing so many,” says Kevin. “I mean, what if we only sold 300? To our relatives? But we sold out in a month, and the second run of 6,000 went in another month.”

“We took out a full-page ad in CBG (Comic Buyers Guide – ed) and sold direct to dealers and distributors – no returns,” says Peter. “It was amazing. We just looked at each other and laughed. And got busy on another number.”

15,000 copies of TMNT #2 sold out in nothing flat. The second release of 30,000 is almost gone. A planned third edition of TMNT #1 is 80% spoken for. TMNT #3 is ready for press and 6 more issues are all mapped out. The turtles – named Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello and Raphael, by their rodent mentor, Splinter – are undergoing character development, preparing for their solo debuts in future issues. And Fugitoid, a pre-turtle robot adventure that the “name” publishers may be sorry they tuned down, will be staging a comeback. Mirage Studios is on a roll.

Peter moved to Sharon last fall so his wife could take a teaching position. Kevin moved down last month. The two of them share the concept work, writing, drawing. inking, lettering, packing, mailing and whatever, working out of a tiny room in Peter’s log cabin home. It looks like they’ll be needing help soon, though. and more room.

The first printing of TMNT #1 is going for $50.00 on the rare comics market. Ninja Turtle iron-ons and metal miniatures are already on the market. T-shirts and a Dungeons-and-Dragons-style board game are in the works. And sales are reaching the level where four-color printing becomes feasible.

Peter and Kevin are enjoying the ride. They aren’t sure how long it will last, but it looks promising and the fan mail is encouraging. They’re getting a charge out of doing what they love and getting paid for it. Right now they don’t have time to consider what else Mirage Studios might do. Everything is coming up turtles. Haii!

“It’s a lot of fun working with Peter, ” says Kevin. “We get to the point, sometimes, where we finish each other’s sentences. I mean. it.s what – ”

” – we’ve always wanted to do,” says Peter with a smile. “Say, would you like to see my Ninja Turtle Advent Calendar?”