In the years since the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were created, Michaelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael and Donatello have become a classically comical part of Americana.
Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, the creators of the Turtles, started the black and white comic book with just $1,200 in 1984. With tons of work and a plethora of good fortunes, they've seen the Turtles go from an underground hit to a world-wide phenomenon. It's been a wild and crazy ride, to say the least!
After a long day of work way back in 1983, Kevin and Peter were relaxing at Peter's house watching television and sketching. "We got real punchy!" Peter explains, and they started drawing cartoons to amuse themselves. At the time Peter was doing editorial illustration and advertising art with some success while Kevin was working as a short-order cook and drawing comics in his spare time. As the evening evolved, Kevin eventually drew a bipedal turtle with nunchuks strapped to his arms and called it a "Ninja Turtle". Peter, aware of a nifty idea when he saw one, asked "Why not a teenage mutant ninja turtle?" and thus the legend was born.
Eastman and Laird liked the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle idea too much to let it remain idle in their sketchbooks. The creative duo wrote an origin story that parodied Frank Miller's Daredevil and Ronin series, comics that Kevin and Peter held in high esteem. The lone TMNT became a group of 4 turtles who had a ninjitsu sensei, a mutated rat named Splinter. Kevin and Peter experimented with drastically different looks for each Turtle, but finally settled upon a singular outfit that they would all wear. Each Ninja Turtle was named after a renown Renaissance artist.
"We had all the Japanese fighting methods, but we didn't want to make up Japanese names because we thought they'd seem too strange to American readers." explains Kevin. "So we decided to go in the opposite direction and used distinctly European names. We both had studied art history, so we picked Raphael, Donatello, Leonardo and Michelangelo."
Back in those days, neither Kevin nor Peter owned a computer with a spell-checker, so Michelangelo was misspelled as "Michaelangelo", fortunately everyone seems to get the point regardless of the additional letter "a". Once Mirage was able relaunch the Turtles franchise in 2003, Peter decided to right the old wrong, and Mikey now spells his name correctly as Michelangelo. It's never too late to fix a mistake.
With the story written, Kevin and Peter began doing the artwork. Since the creative duo had similar styles, they were able to switch tasks back and forth. Some pages were penciled by Kevin and inked by Peter, some pages were penciled by Peter and inked by Kevin. Once the complete comic book was finished, they set out to find a publisher for it. Much to their dismay, the guys had no luck finding someone willing to print the title.
真正诞生的第一只忍者龟是"拉菲尔"
这是后来经过改良后的第一次出版, 本人在很小的时候,有幸在国内买到其中的三册, 虽然不是有名的出版社出版的,但及有保存价值