Creation Story
Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird built the Turtles as a parody, four reptiles crossed with Frank Miller’s Daredevil and Ronin, drawn in the house they shared at 28 Union Street in Dover, New Hampshire and self-published in 1984 as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1. Their sensei, the rat Splinter, named the four brothers for Renaissance artists. Raphael takes his name from the painter Raphael.
Of the four, Raphael is the one Eastman and Laird wrote with an edge. He is the hothead, the brother who solves a problem with his fists first and talks himself down second, and the one who most often breaks from the group to work alone. His weapons are a pair of sai.
He is also, by accident of history, the only Turtle who still looks the way the comics drew him. In the original black-and-white Mirage issues all four brothers wore red bandanas. When the 1987 Playmates toy line needed to tell the figures apart on a shelf, it handed blue, purple, and orange to the others and left Raphael in red. Peter Laird has said the assignments were random. Raphael simply kept what he started with.
First Appearance and First Cover: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1
Raphael’s first appearance is Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1 (May 1984), which Eastman and Laird debuted at a comic convention in Portsmouth, New Hampshire on a first print run of 3,275 copies. All four Turtles arrive at once, full appearance and cover. Splinter, the Foot Clan, and the Shredder, Oroku Saki, debut in the same issue, which packs an origin, a team, a master, and an archenemy into one oversized black-and-white comic. It became one of the Copper Age keys that anchor this first-appearance archive.
That first printing is now one of the most valuable independent comics ever published. The run was tiny, the near-black cover shows every flaw, and the oversized format made clean copies hard to keep, so high grades are scarce. The highest grade on the CGC census is 9.8, and one of those copies sold for $245,000 in September 2021. The wider story of the issue and the franchise it launched is on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles team page.
First Solo Issue: Raphael #1
Raphael headlined the first Turtle spin-off Mirage ever published, Raphael #1 (April 1985), a one-shot titled “Me, Myself, and I.” It matters out of proportion to its size, because it is the first appearance of Casey Jones.
The setup is pure Raphael. Sparring with Michelangelo, he loses his temper, and Leonardo sends him out to cool off. On the rooftops he runs into Casey Jones, a self-appointed vigilante in a hockey mask carrying a golf bag full of sports gear, beating a group of muggers well past the point Raphael thinks is fair. Raph steps in to stop him, and the two wreck a city park fighting each other. Casey would become Raphael’s closest friend and a fixture of the series, but he arrives here as the one opponent whose temper runs as hot as Raph’s own.
