Reading Mirage Comics During Turtlemania?
 

I was watching the "The Making of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Behind the Shells" and one scene that stood out to me were kids sitting at a park reading the Mirage comics. It might have been staged for the documentary, but did the success of the Fred Wolf cartoon bring more awareness and readership from fans of the cartoon to the Mirage comics as well?

Comic shops were everywhere at the time, so Mirage definitely got a little boost back in those days... but mostly the Archie series got to ride the Fred Wolf "Turtlemania" train, as the Archie series was Comics Code-approved so it was in grocery stores everywhere. Mirage never had anywhere near the numbers of the Archie series, as a result. It's hard to discover a thing you never knew existed, as a kid.

It worked on me. I was confused by what I was reading, but I enjoyed it. :tlol:

The colorized First Graphic Novel line (volumes 1, 3, and 4) were definitely my gateway into the Mirage Universe (as a kid, I thought they might be different versions of the movie adaptation, since the plot and art style were so similar to the actual movie adaptation book), in addition to the cover gallery that was included in The Official TMNT Treasury book.

As a kid I always came across black and white TMNT comics with Turtles with red bandanas on the cover, so I always knew there was this other version of TMNT out there even if I was too young to follow it at the time.

Me too.
I caught the credit at the end of the cartoon, and then went looking for the comics.

In fact, that cartoon is what got me into comics in the first place, as Turtles was the first comic I started reading on a month-to-month basis.

I have a very vivid memory of photocopying the short stories from the back of the RPG manuals that were kept in the YA Center of my local library.

The Archie comics had "Eastman and Laird's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" at their covers. I knew those names were behind for years, almost nothing else. Even used to search for it using an encyclopedia, but found nothing.

I think a lot of you are forgetting most of us were young kids or not even born yet during 1984-1995. And there was no internet back then. It was much harder to research or discover something unless you just happened to come across it in shops or comic stores.

Most of the time I used to find old TMNT comics in flea markets in the early 90's. Had no idea about them back then, I picked them up because I recognized the Turtles on the covers.

I came across the Mirage comics pretty early on in the form of Mark Martin's TMNT #16, which was overstocked at my local Hills Department store. In that book, I saw ads for the Mirage Turtles' books. At the local mall's Waldenbooks, I bought the First Graphic Novel with allowance money, and read the original books that way.

When the movie was released I was about 11. Most of my friends at the time were confused as to why the Turtles' origin in the movie was different than the cartoon, so I enlightened them about Mirage. Most kids didn't seem to know about it at the time.

Same for me as well. I did like the Mirage comic better than the Archie one which I could get my head around although the UK stories weren't complex at all.

I had a children's storybook adapting "The Magic Crystal" into something that was probably the Archieverse. I always wondered why Kirby King's portal looked like Krang's Technodrome portal.

Slightly unrelated but there was the one Original Cartoon episode in season 5 (Michelagelo meets Bugman) where at the end, Michelangelo was reading a comic book about the turtles and said it was the silliest idea ever.

I wonder if that was a reference to Mirage or Archie, and how Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman would've reacted :lol:

I think it's a reference to that November day in 1983 in New England when Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird actually created TMNT.