Posted by Joey Peters on Sep 01, 2026
If you follow me you are already well aware of the tiny pittance that comic book creators make in the grand scheme of things. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, creators of Superman, had to put a curse on DC Comics to shame them into giving them a meager stipend at the end of their lives. Bill Finger died in obscurity despite creating everything you think of when you think of Batman. And this continues to this day. Major creatives from the 70’s and 80’s, such as Peter David (the creator of most of what you would think of as the modern version of the Hulk, as well as many others) had to set up a GoFundMe to pay for medical expenses at the end of his life.
There are exceptions. Bob Kane turned himself into a minor celebrity for his “creation” of Batman. Swindling Stan Lee was a nepo baby who made you think he single handedly created all of Marvel’s great characters. Jack Kirby, Lee’s collaborator on most of those Marvel characters managed to make himself a big enough name that he could survive on the largesse of the comics fandom and to an extent dictate terms to the big publishers. These were the exceptions and every other creator either moved on to better paying work elsewhere or slaved away in poverty.
The reason that so many comic creators make peanuts while their creations are turned into blockbuster movies, streaming series and printed underpants that generate billions in revenue is that most of the comics published by the industry are work-for-hire. This is a method of work where the creators are paid to hand over the rights for their creations. By the 70’s this was beginning to become a conversation in the burgeoning comics fandom. Still, being a comic book creator was (and is) a highly desirable job, so if someone agitated for more rights and control to their work there were a thousand teenagers who would sell their mother into eternal slavery to ink a backup feature in Space Cabby.
At the time comics were distributed to newsstands as magazines. Newsstand distribution operated on a mass scale consignment scheme where publishers would massively overprint their books and newsstands would only pay for those magazines that actually sold, destroyed the unsold stock when the date on the magazine came due.
As the 70’s wore on comic book specialty shops began to emerge. These shops would buy much lower quantities of books, but they were for the fandom, so they would be more willing to purchase their stock outright. This opened up a new possibility in publishing. You could sell a small run of books without pulping most of them.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles didn’t start off as a marketing juggernaut, it started off as a doodle of a turtle with nunchucks. From there, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird crafted an on the nose parody of the then current Frank Miller Daredevil comics; down to the details that the eponymous turtles were doused with mutagen in the same incident where Matt Murdock was blinded but gained the super power to not be blind, but also instead of cruel ninja master Stick teaching them, the turtles were trained by the wise ninja-rat Splinter, and instead of the Hand ninja clan the turtles faced off against The Foot Clan. And since Eastman and Laird were self publishing this book they didn’t have to deal with editorial toning down their instincts. The original TMNT comics were dark and brutal.
And this was exactly the right thing at exactly the right time. Even a few years before the distribution network of comic book stores would not have existed to purchase their stock, but now there was a burgeoning market for gritty comics for an adult audience (and Eastman and Laird were canny showmen with a solid understanding of the media).
All of this meant that they very quickly sold out their print run of three thousand issues and then had to go into reprints. Mirage Comics, the studio they founded, went from being a functional mirage set up to make Eastman and Laird look like a legitimate outfit into being the hottest independent studio making comic books.
This led to a gold rush in the comic book industry called the Black and White Boom. Most of these books were relatively comfortable comic book fare: superheroes, science fiction… books like Love and Rockets by Los Bros Hernandez, Matt Wagner’s Mage, Paul Chadwick’s Concrete, Wendy and Richard Pini’s ElfQuest, Ben Edlund’s The Tick, Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo… there were a lot of them. Most of these books were put out by small presses, however, and didn’t offer the same level of ownership and control that publishing your comics for yourself could afford you. The thing is that while many of these books may have topped TMNT as a black and white comic, the upper bounds of how much money you could make in the 80’s publishing independent comic books was still fairly low, and for every Dave Sim’s Cerberus that might arise you would get a hundred ashcans that no one would ever bother to buy.
And that’s not really even touching on the ripoffs that flooded the direct market; books meant to “parody” the ninja turtles, parodying a parody is an asinine premise… how can you critique a work that takes an existing thing and exaggerates it for satiric effect and then exaggerate it for satiric effect? Regardless, they had ludicrous titles like: Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters,
Pre-Teen Dirty-Gene Kung-Fu Kangaroos, Geriatric Gangrene Jujitsu Gerbils, or Aristocratic Xtraterrestrial Time-Traveling Thieves. They were all kind of interchangeable.
TMNT did have one special edge, however, and that was merchendising. Initially this was restricted to high level nerd shit; tabletop gaming figurines and role playing source books. But soon a marketing executive named Mark Freedman caught wind of the turtles and licensed them for a cartoon series. The tone was markedly more childlike and toyetic. The turtles were given color coded masks to help differentiate them. And after the cartoon series hit the world changed.
The thing is that Eastman and Laird maintained their ownership and control of the turtles, and were licensing them out for their own benefit.
And they did what they could to share their success with their peers. When Dave Sim, misogynist crank and creator of Cerberus came into conflict with Diamond Comic Distributors. Diamond are one of the worst devils of the comic book industry, although for the most part they put the squeeze on publishers and the direct market stores they serviced. Self publishers, however, would be caught in their web of bullshit.
This through an elaborate chain of consequences led to the convening of a group of comic book creators from the North East meeting at the Mirage Comics headquarters and drafting the Comic Book Creator’s Bill of Rights.
This ended up not having much external impact (except for The Comics Journal comic book news publications cared a hell of a lot more about if Spider-Man got a new costume or the summer crossover), but it tells you a lot about what Eastman and Laird really cared about. This would have been roughly contemporaneous with the first wave of Turtle Mania, soon after the release of the original 1987 cartoon.
I don’t need to tell you about the impact of the ninja turtles. The original cartoon remained on TV through the 90’s. The original movie was honestly legitimately good cinema and they made several movies after that for some reason. Since then there have been several revivals; those tend to attempt a grittier tone, but one still much more chill than the original (shocking and horrifying) comics.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is in my estimation the most successful independent comic book of all time. It is certainly the comic book which has made it’s creator’s the most money. And that’s because they held onto their ownership and control of the work for decades.
Peter Laird founded the Xeric Foundation, which is a typical kind of rich guy foundation dedicated to distributing money to charity. That wouldn’t be too interesting, except for that for it’s first twenty years of existence it’s main public facing activity was granting money to cartoonists who wanted to self publish.
On the other hand, Kevin Eastman founded Tundra Publishing. They were a publisher who put emphasis on creator ownership. They were the Cadillac of comic book publishing in the 90’s. The most infmaous thing they published would have been Lost Girls, Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s pornographic crossover fanfic about Alice of Wonderland, Dorothy of Oz and Wendy of Neverland meeting as adults. The most famous work published by them is From Hell, another Alan Moore joint, this one with Eddie Campbell, which is the largest scale why-done-it style mystery where they attempt to solve the society that produced Jack the Ripper.
TMNT has remained a popular franchise down to this day. There have been more cartoons, video games and underpants than anyone could have expected back in 1984.
Eastman and Laird remained in the comics industry for decades. Their level of ownership and control has slowly waned as time has gone on, eventually allowing other publishers to take on a lot of the risk and expense of printing and distributing the Mirage version of the Ninja Turtles.
By the 2000’s Eastman was slowly selling off his stake to Laird. Eventually, once Eastman’s stake was gone entirely, Laird sold the whole kit and caboodle to Nickelodeon. It is unfortunate, but Eastman and Laird benefited greatly from their decades long ownership of the franchise and I can understand it being too frustrating to manage after so long.
I think Eastman and Laird are the best case scenario that a cartoonist could hope for. They cared deeply about the plight of their peers despite their success and they tried to do something about it.
You will note that Marxists always harp on about who owns what and how they make their money. Intellectual property is one of many means of production that exist in the capitalist world. Since TMNT there has been a strong tradition of self publishing in comics. Is that the revolution? No. Absolutely not. Are coops the revolution? Again no. But is it better for a creator to maintain ownership of their intellectual property? It is absolutely better than it being owned and controlled by Nickelodeon.
The thing is that this is not a silver bullet. The most successful independent comics since was Walking Dead, now itself a massive franchise that has made Robert Kirkman quite rich, with the more recent Invincible cartoon bringing up the rear. The thing is that Kirkman has had conflict with his old collaborator Tony Moore (the original artist on Walking Dead). Still, this is much less exploitative than anything DC Comics ever did to Siegel and Shuster, Bill Finger, Alan Moore and the other writers and artists they’ve fucked over. You know Tony Moore wet his beak and I expect Ryan Ottley and Cory Walker have likewise.
It is imperfect but self publishing and creator ownership is preferable, and much closer to the people who do the work of making the thing having ownership and democratic control over that thing.
Sources
Light history of TMNT
https://www.toonopedia.com/turtles.htm
A list of TMNT ripoffs
https://dandreifort.com/2020/07/24/tmnt-comic-knockoffs/
Comic Book Creator’s Bill of Rights
http://www.scottmccloud.com/4-inventions/bill/