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Peter Alan Laird is an American comic book artist who was born January 27, 1954 in North Adams, Massachusetts. He is best known for co-creating Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the fall of 1983 with Kevin Eastman. He exhibited a love of drawing at an early age as well as a fascination with dinosaurs, robots, and other things of an outré nature.*
On his way to breaking into the comics field, Laird made several temporary digressions, including obtaining a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in printmaking from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst; self-publishing an (unabashedly bad) homage to Barry Windsor-Smith's Conan, titled Barbaric Fantasy; contributing cartoons and illustrations to the UMass student newspaper, the Daily Collegian, co-creating and contributing to a free monthly comic book called Scat; and making the archetypical "starving artist's" living as a freelance illustrator for about eight years.*
It was a chance meeting with Eastman in Northampton in 1982 that started Laird on a new path which led to the much sought after "big break." After which, Laird stopped looking for freelance work and devoted himself entirely to TMNT.*
Since then, Laird founded the Xeric Foundation, a nonprofit organization that provides grants to new comic book creators to self-publish their work.
Peter has also published the graphic novel, Planet Racer, along with Jim Lawson. In season 3 of the 2003 TMNT series, an episode was based on the Planet Racer's theme.
Laird is married to Jeannie Atkins, a writer, with whom he lives in Haydenville, MA.*
NOTE: Paragraphs marked with an asterisk are taken from a biography published in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, First Graphic Novel Number Nine (ISBN 0-915419-09-2), published in November of 1986 by First Comics, Inc. This information may be out of date.
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1954 births | Living people | Comics artists | Mirage Studios
"Peter Laird"