Mirage Studios
US comic book company
Mirage Studios was an American comic book company founded in 1983 by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird in Dover, New Hampshire. The company was best known for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT) comic book series and the subsequent franchise it has spawned.
History
Mirage Studios was started in 1983, in Dover, New Hampshire. The company was named "Mirage" because there was no actual company. Less than a year before Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1 was published in May 1984, Eastman and Laird began experimenting with numerous series. Mirage then moved to Sharon, Connecticut, and stayed there for two years before ending up in Northampton, Massachusetts.
With the success of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Eastman and Laird hired a core group of artists to help with the increasing workload. The first addition to the studio roster was Eastman's high school friend Steve Lavigne, brought on in 1984 as a letterer.
In 1985, Eastman and Laird hired artist Ryan Brown to assist them as an inker for the Turtles. Brown would be the first in a long line of artists, other than Eastman and Laird, that would work on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Mirage Studios” as uS comic book company. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as uS comic book company. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2623393. VIAF identifies the subject as 123569268. The Library of Congress control number is no2009199127. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1983, 1984 and 1985.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.
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The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.
Three-step research path
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- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Mirage Studios” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.