Eastman and Laird's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - Origin of The Concept

Origin of The Concept

The concept originated from a comical drawing sketched out by Kevin Eastman during a casual evening of brainstorming with his friend Peter Laird. The drawing of a short, squat turtle wearing a mask with nunchakus strapped to its arms was incredibly funny to the young artists, as it played upon the inherent contradiction of a slow, cold-blooded reptile with the speed and agility of the Japanese martial arts. At Laird's suggestion, they created a team of four such turtles, each specializing in a different weapon. Eastman and Laird often cite the work of Frank Miller and Jack Kirby as their major artistic influences.

Using money from a tax refund together with a loan from Eastman's uncle, they formed Mirage Studios and self-published a single-issue comic book that would parody four popular comics of the early 1980s: Marvel Comics' The New Mutants, which featured teenage mutants, Cerebus, Ronin, and Daredevil, which featured ninja clans dueling for control of the New York City underworld.

In fact, many comics fans will recognize in the Turtles' origin several direct allusions to Daredevil: The traffic accident, involving a blind man and a truck carrying radioactive ooze, is a reference to Daredevil's own origin story (Indeed in the version told in the first issue Splinter sees the canister strike a boy's face, though in this world it does not split until it reaches the turtles). The name "Splinter" is a parody on Daredevil's mentor, a man known as "Stick." The Foot, a clan of evil ninja who became the Turtles' arch-enemies, is a parody of the Hand, who were themselves a mysterious and deadly ninja clan in the pages of Daredevil.