TMNT Vol. I

Issue 002, Published by Mirage Studios

SUMMARY:

From the personal collection of Kevin Eastman (w/ COA); Uncut Pages Error (siamese pages) – a copy of TMNT #2 1st Printing where the first 20 pages weren’t properly trimmed, preventing those pages from being opened and making them unreadable. Signed & sketched on front cover by Kevin Eastman & Peter Laird 12/13/2025CGC Signature Series Authentication #4732340001.

Improperly trimmed copies of TMNT #1 (2nd Printing) & #2 (1st Printing) are extremely rare and have historical significance to the early days of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. There were a large number of those two books that had to be hand-trimmed by Kevin & Peter before being distributed – which Peter later documented in 2014 (thirty years later) via an article on his Blog (see below). Most copies of TMNT #1 (2nd Printing) & #2 1st Printing (if not all copies) that were distributed by Mirage Studios and then sold to the public in comic shops were pre-inspected and/or hand-trimmed to ensure all pages could be opened. Even if some improperly trimmed copies actually made it to the general public, they would have almost surely been manually hand-trimmed by the book owner (or comic shop), returned for refund or replacement, or even destroyed since they would have been unreadable. All of this makes it nearly impossible to find an improperly trimmed copy that has survived the years. Thankfully, Kevin Eastman & Peter Laird preserved a few of these improperly trimmed copies for their personal collections – which is pretty much the only place these ultra-rare books have existed until now.

(Snippets #20: July 23, 1984) – “The turtles, by the way, are doing fine. Kevin came down last Wednesday and helped me sort and package about four thousand of them for shipping to our wholesalers, after getting them back from the printer on Tuesday. One bit of bum news was that the printer who did the newsprint insides of the book screwed up on a lot of the folding, with the result that when the printer who did the cover and the binding went to trim the books, a lot of them were incompletely trimmed, and Kevin and I had to go ahead and hand-trim about 500 of them. A mollifying factor is that we got about 250 more than we paid for, but it’s still a drag.” [I’d forgotten that thing about trimming the badly-trimmed copies of TMNT #1 second printing, but it reminded me that we had to do something similar with some copies of issue #2 when we were in Connecticut. What a pain! . — PL]