Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles started as a parody. Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird self-published a black-and-white one-shot in 1984 that sent up everything popular in comics at the time — Frank Miller's Daredevil and Ronin, Marvel's mutants, New Mutants — printed 3,000 copies on a loan from Eastman's uncle, and watched it sell out.
About Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles started as a parody. Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird self-published a black-and-white one-shot in 1984 that sent up everything popular in comics at the time — Frank Miller's Daredevil and Ronin, Marvel's mutants, New Mutants — printed 3,000 copies on a loan from Eastman's uncle, and watched it sell out. The joke title was the point. What followed is one of the strangest commercial trajectories in comics: a violent monochrome satire licensed within three years into a children's cartoon, a toy line that sold in the hundreds of millions, and a franchise that has since oscillated between the grim original register and the bright one that made the money.
The original comic was a parody of Daredevil and the X-Men, self-published in a print run of 3,000.
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Key eras
| Era | Years | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| Mirage comics | 1984–1993 | Black-and-white, self-published, and considerably more violent than what followed. |
| Cartoon and toys | 1987–1996 | The children's series and a toy line that dominated the era. |
| Modern | 2003– | Successive reboots alternating between the two registers. |