“Timing,” Peter Laird proclaims wistfully, “in a lot of ways is everything.” A quarter of a century after first introducing his most famous creations to the world alongside long time co-conspirator Kevin Eastman, the artist has had plenty time to reflect on such things. It’s hard to argue with the sentiment. The introduction of The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as a black and white comic in the fall of 1983 was about as perfect as timing gets.

Three years after the release of that first book, the Turtles had been successfully translated into an animated series and action figure line. Soon after that, Eastman and Laird’s creations would become a bona fide cultural phenomenon.

Even after the cartoons, and the movies, and the breakfast cereals, however, the duo have never forgotten their roots as struggling independent cartoonist who, in the face of rejection from power house publishers, Marvel and DC, took a leap into the often rocky world of self-publishing. Eastman, for his part, launched Tundra in 1990, publishing works by artists like Jim Woodring, Scott McCloud, and Mike Allred. Laird took things a step further, creating the Xeric Foundation, which since 1992, has been a major force in self-publishing, having issued grants to such future big name artists as Jason Lutes, Adrian Tomine, Tom Hart, Jessica Abel, and Gene Yang.

We had the fortune of bumping in Laird in amongst the gauntlet that is The New York Comic Con Artist Alley. We spoke to the artist about his journey from self-publishing to pop-cultural icon.

Is it ever hard looking at those old books? What’s your first thought when someone hands you one of the originals?

I’m not really sure, I mean, it does take me back, definitely. Twenty-five years is a long time–almost half my life, in fact. But it does take me back to a period in my life when it was incredibly exciting to be doing our comic book. Even more it was exciting because it was a comic book that people seemed to want to buy and read. For Kevin and I both, it was a fantastic time for us.

When did the decision to self-publish come about?

We wanted to work for Marvel and DC. Back then, that was really 95-percent of what you could do in comics.

It’s still pretty close to that, right?

Yeah, yeah. Although there are a lot more avenues these days. Back then there was a certain amount of self-publishing going on, but not nearly what it is today. And we did a couple of things for different companies and got rejected. We saw what the Pinis were doing with Elfquest, what Dave Sim was doing with Cerebus, and of course we were aware of some of the underground comics. We finally said, “screw it, we’ll do it ourselves.” That’s the power of self-publishing. No one else wants you, so you do it yourself. So that’s what we did.

The work seemed to straddle the fence between the more traditional stuff and some of the more comedic underground work, like, say R. Crumb—were artists like him an influence on the work?

Oh yeah, that was an influence maybe not so much on content, but definitely on spirit. It was exciting for us to see people getting that kind of distribution on their own. Obviously it wasn’t getting the kind of distribution of a Superman or a Fantastic Four, but it was getting out there. Clearly you’d read these books and you could tell that these were people who really passionately wanted to do this. They had something to say, and this was a great avenue to say it.

The early books seemed geared toward older readers. How did the Turtles end up skewing so young?

Well, it was a natural progression. Kevin and I did the comics for ourselves. We did them the way we wanted to read them. When the toy company and then the animated series came along, of course it was obvious they were going for a younger audience, which was fine by us, because the way we looked at it, we could compromise and make the Turtles skew younger for that audience because we still had the books and we could make them the way that we wanted, which we continued to do.

Was it hard to take that first step, in terms of letting your creation get away from you?

Yeah, though at the time we were pretty star struck. I’ve been thinking about it as I’ve been pondering the 25th anniversary, and it was only three years from the date of publication of the first comic until the animated series started. That’s mind boggling. Two yahoos in their living room in New Hampshire, publishing the first issue with 3,000 copies and it goes in three years to become a major toy line and a major animated series, and in the following years number one in both fields. It was very bizarre.

Ultimately, in a sense it’s become the creation of a lot more than those first two people. Have the cartoons and the other work that has been projected on the characters affected the way you write them?

Some, but not a lot. It is difficult sometimes, but it is possible to compartmentalize that kind of stuff. One of the things about creating something like this is, once you’ve created it and it gets out into the public, it takes on a mind of its own. I’m not gonna say that none of what has happened outside of my hands has influenced me—it has. Although I still think I have a real powerful sense of the way Kevin and I originally perceived and created them, and when I write a comic that features the Turtles, I still write from that inner place.

Did you ever feel as if you were working against that external force? How important was it to stay true to that original vision?

You know, in a lot of ways, when we signed the first deals to the first series and the first line of toys, it was our first time at bat with that stuff and we were somewhat naïve. For the most part, we had good deals, but we didn’t have a lot of approval rights. Right now I have a lot more. I’m a lot more savvy about that stuff. But at the time, it was about compartmentalizing. We understood that to get a whole time line and get those out into stores, to have  a TV show broadcast nationwide and to get it all over the world, we had to compromise, to take our characters and soften them up. But for the large part, we let other people do that, so we could focus on our own work, which was the comic books.

It seems like it’s also been fairly important for both of you to give back to independent publishers. You’ve both had a fairly large role in that, whether through the Xeric grant or starting your own publishing house.

Yeah. Something that really played a large part in the creation of the Xeric foundation is the fact that, if Kevin and I hadn’t been able to borrow some money to create that first issue, it might have taken us months, maybe years before we could do it, and who knows what would have happened if that amount of time had passed, because timing, in a lot of ways, is everything.

–Brian Heater

Of course Bob Fingerman is kidding when he suggests that the title of this article ought be “Bob Fingerman: Portrait in Self-Defeat.” Well, mostly.

Fingerman doesn’t go out of his way to please all the people all the time—after all, that’s what syndicated Sunday funnies are for. In the most simplistic terms, his work often reads like an adult What If? comic. What if zombies took over an elementary school? What if a black man’s brain was transplanted into the body of a white teenage girl? What if vampires had a conscious about the whole killing people thing?

The results are strange, warped, hilarious, occasionally disturbing, and, above all, aggressively unique, which is no doubt one of the main reasons why the artist’s short-lived stint on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles book wasn’t exactly a match made in heaven.

But, while Fingerman has seemingly been less than eager to compromise his work for the sake of wide-scale acceptance, over the years, the industry has largely come around to his unique vision.

In this third and final part of our interview with Fingerman, we discuss the artist’s brushes with the mainstream.

[Part One][Part Two]

You had some really strange gigs starting out. What was the strangest thing you had to do? You were doing a lot of adult stuff, right?

Yeah, but that wasn’t strange. That was just expedient. My only regret with doing any of that stuff was that I wish I had used a pseudonym. At the time, I was young and cocky and thought, ‘I’m not ashamed.’ And it’s not that I’m ashamed of that stuff now, but one of the books that I’ve done is a kids book, and I probably should have used a penname, because I don’t want parents who buy something to look for my backcatalog, and then suddenly you’ve got someone with jizz dripping off their face [laughs]. It’s not really going to endear you to book buyers with kids. But that stuff wasn’t strange, really. It was easy and it paid well. It shows how the economy and the fates have changed that the best pay I’ve ever gotten was 10 years ago, doing porno comics. When I was working for Penthouse Comics, I was getting $1,000 per page, which is unheard of, you know? That’s an insane rate.

Especially for an indie cartoonist.

Yeah, for independents, you get paid that for an entire book. There I was doing three pages a month for several months. It was the easiest work in the world. Come up with some funny tit jokes and get paid $3,000. It was great. Probably the strangest thing was doing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Oh yeah. You did that for about a year, right? Was it that long?

Yeah, pretty much. I don’t know if that was exactly the perfect fit of artist and material, and I know that when I was drawing them, they got sort of progressively crankier. I think my art always reflects my own state of mind. I did like a three or four issue run, and, by the time I got to the final issue, they looked like middle-aged mutant ninja turtles. They all looked so fed up and they had bags under their eyes. It was pathetic. It really was not a good fit.

How did that come about?

Well, Kevin Eastman, who is a really good guy—and I’m not even knocking the turtles. I’m just saying, I’m not really the right guy for it. I had done very few comic books at the time, and was just trying to get into regular comics, because I had just been working for Cracked at the time. I was also an illustrator for years, and I just wanted to get into regular comic books. All I had done at the time was a couple of things for Eros and a couple of things for Heavy Metal. Honestly, I don’t really remember how it came to be.

When you were looking to break into “regular comics,” were you looking to start up on a regular existing series?

No, I always wanted to do my own thing. It’s amazing how much the business has changed in the last couple of decades. In the ‘80s, it the whole black and white independent boom, and I didn’t really get in on any of that. The first actual solo comic of mine came it in like ’91, but I had already been doing comics professionally for about seven years. But most of them for magazines like Cracked. When I first got in, I started doing a lot of things for anthologies, because there were a lot of anthologies in the late ‘80s. Companies like Pacific Comics did a lot of almost EC-like anthologies.

It seems to fit in with this self-defeatist mentality that, as soon as you get established with comics, you decide that you want to break into the literary world.

Yeah, there’s something to that. I don’t want to perpetuate this ‘self-defeatism’ theme. I just like trying different things, and I’ve always wanted to do novels. Ultimately I’d love to have a balance where I could do one graphic novel one year and a prose novel the next, and just keep alternating. That would always keep things fresh. I’ve never really just stuck with one character, and it seems like almost everyone who makes it does a series and sticks with one thing. I just like to keep trying different things. It’s sort of a very catchphrase culture that we live in. People like familiarity.

The majority of the stuff that you do seems to be driven by the spark of a story idea, rather than by a character. Like, ‘what would happen if a bunch of zombies invaded a kindergarten?’

Right. The funny thing there is that I was actually thinking a little more commercially. I actually did see Recess Pieces as being the first book in a series. That was definitely going to be setting up future volumes, but it didn’t exactly work that way. I had actually seen that as a book-length pitch for a video game. I thought that would be great to have a bunch of little kids blowing zombies to bits. I thought it be funny to do a survival horror Resident Evil sort of thing with pre-pubescent kids, because you couldn’t do it as a movie and you couldn’t do it as a TV show, but video games are sort of the last bastion of where you can get away with this stuff.

And comic books.

Yeah, exactly, because I think they’re both a little less policed.

What would the sequel have been?

I was going to advance it by a few months and take it into the dead of winter when all of their parents and adults had been dead, and it was just going to be this group of survivalist kids living in this completely snow-bound area, fighting zombies. I think that would have been fun.

We keep coming back to this idea of self-defeatism. It looks like a children’s book, and it’s about children, but it’s incredibly gory.

Yeah. Yep.

If I’m doing PR for Dark Horse, who am I pitching this to?

Yeah. Well, I guess you have your title for this article. Bob Fingerman: Portrait in self-defeat. Kidding. That’s a joke. Slap a bunch of winking emoticons and cheery animated GIFs all over that shit. 2009 I’m in it to win it!

–Brian Heater