The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Started As A Marvel Parody
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have reinvented themselves more times than Madonna. In the almost 40 years since their creation, the turtles have gone from a goofy ’80s cartoon to a live-action movie franchise to a pair of successful arcade games and beyond. Not bad, considering the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles started off as a Marvel parody.
Most fans know that the TMNT began life as a gritty black-and-white indie comic, but what they might not know is that the first issue of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was actually a parody of Marvel’s Daredevil. Specifically, Frank Miller’s early ’80s run on the book.
Miller was the creator of Daredevil’s blind ninja sensai Stick as well as a clan of evil ninjas known as the Hand that has gone on to plague The Man Without Fear for decades.
Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird were big fans of Frank Miller’s run on the Daredevil comic, so much so that when they decided to make a cheap black-and-white comic book featuring four anthropomorphic turtles with ninja weapons, the duo decided it would be fun to poke fun at their favorite comic character.
Eastman and Laird named the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ sensai Splinter after the Marvel character Stick, while the Foot Clan is obviously modeled after the Hand.
Perhaps the TMNT’s funniest and most cheeky reference to Daredevil comes in the form of the turtle’s origin. While it’s been retold and retooled more times than one can count, the original version of the accident that created the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was deliberately intended to be not just similar to the accident that caused Marvel hero Daredevil to go blind but believe it or not the very same event.
In Daredevil’s origin, a young Matt Murdock sees a truck carrying canisters of toxic waste about to strike and an old blind man wandering across the road. Murdock pushes the man out of the way, only for a canister to fall from the truck and hit him in the face, blinding him but giving him his incredible radar sense.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles would skyrocket to such levels of popularity that the creators claim to have turned down an offer from Marvel itself to publish the comic…
In the first issue of Eastman and Laird’s original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic, a canister full of an unknown toxic substance hits a young man in the face—heavily implied to be Matt Murdock—before hitting the pavement and rolling down into the sewers where it shatters and bathes the turtles in the ooze that mutates them.
Daredevil might have been the main source of inspiration for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but it was a different Marvel comic that partially inspired the group’s name. X-Men spinoff New Mutants was a very popular title for Marvel in the early 1980s.
The book featured a group of teenage mutants who, along with the successful indie comic Cerebus and its talking Aardvark protagonist, inspired Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird to make their heroes a team of under-18, mutated talking animals.
Eastman and Laird named the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ sensai Splinter after the Marvel character Stick, while the Foot Clan is obviously modeled after the Hand.
Eastman and Laird weren’t particularly worried about any sort of legal repercussions because the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic was intended as a one-off gag that the duo doubted would even make it onto Marvel’s radar.
What the two creators didn’t realize was that the comic book would prove to be a phenomenal smash hit that would become more well-known than some the titles it was poking fun at. Once it became clear that the Ninja Turtles were going to be huge, changes had to be made to the creators’ original vision for the team.
Changes Since 1984’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1
For one thing, Shredder—who died at the end of the very first issue of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles—was changed into a recurring villain starting with the first cartoon and continuing through most iterations of the TMNT.
Perhaps more importantly, the team’s origin was altered to avoid any comparisons to Daredevil. Ironically, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles would skyrocket to such levels of popularity that the creators claim to have turned down an offer from Marvel itself to publish the comic, confident that they were doing well enough on their own.
Meanwhile, Daredevil himself didn’t get his own live-action feature until the ill-fated 2003 Ben Affleck film—well past the time that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had taken over the globe—and didn’t become a household name until Marvel’s 2015 Daredevil series on Netflix.
With a new movie premiering in August—the franchise’s seventh overall—it’s fair to say that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is the most successful parody of all time.
