Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

The original Mirage Studios comic by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, from 1984 Two friends with a few thousand dollars of borrowed money, trading as Mirage Studios, printed 3,000 copies of a black-and-white comic about four turtle ninjas in 1984. It was an immediate success, and the first issue was reprinted several times to meet demand. From that one self-funded print run came cartoons, toys and films, the biggest leap any comic here has made, which is reason enough to read where it began. The early Mirage issues are grittier and stranger than the cartoon suggests, a send-up of Frank Miller's Daredevil and other comics of the time, and they remain in print in collected editions.