Creation Story
Splinter is the one character in the first issue who is not a Turtle. He is their teacher, a rat, and in the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1 his story arrives as a few panels of backstory. In the Mirage version he belonged to a ninja master named Hamato Yoshi, kept as a pet, and learned ninjutsu the only way a caged rat could, by watching Yoshi practice and copying the movements. When Yoshi was murdered in New York by Oroku Saki, the Shredder, Splinter was left masterless and took to the sewers.
This is the detail most people get wrong, because the 1987 cartoon rewrote it. In the comics Splinter is Yoshi’s rat. In the cartoon Splinter is Yoshi, a man mutated into a rat. Both versions end in the sewer, and both raise four mutated turtles, but the relationship to Hamato Yoshi is the opposite, and the comics version is the original.
It was Splinter who named the brothers. Eastman and Laird have him choose Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, and Michelangelo, the Renaissance masters, for four reptiles he was raising underground, which is how a quartet of sewer turtles ended up carrying the names of Italian painters and sculptors.
First Appearance: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1
Splinter first appears in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1 (May 1984), the self-published Mirage debut Eastman and Laird printed in 3,275 copies and brought to a comic convention in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. He shares the Copper Age issue with the four Turtles, the Foot Clan, and the Shredder, the man who killed his master, though the Mirage Splinter never settles that score himself. Across the original run it is the Turtles who defeat the Shredder, not their sensei.
The issue that introduces him is one of the most valuable independent comics ever published, and a cornerstone of this first-appearance archive. Its first printing is scarce in high grade thanks to a tiny run and a near-black cover that punishes any wear, and a top-graded CGC 9.8 copy sold for $245,000 in September 2021. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles team page has the full origin and franchise context for the issue.
