Kevin Brooks Eastman (born May 30, 1962) is an American comic book writer and artist best known for co-creating the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with Peter Laird.

The forty-page oversized comic had an initial print run of 3,275 copies and was largely funded by a $1,000 loan from Eastman's uncle Quentin.

[9] Laird's newspaper experience led to the two creating a four-page press kit,[10] which included a story outline and artwork.

This led to widespread press coverage of both the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Mirage Studios itself, creating a demand for the comic.

[7] The Turtles phenomenon saw the duo invited to their first comics convention at the tenth annual Atlanta Fantasy Fair in 1984, where they mingled with notable fandom celebrities like Larry Niven, Forrest J Ackerman and Fred Hembeck.

[7][11] Their fifth issue of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was released in November 1985, and was downsized to the more common American comics-format and size.

[13] The half-hour episodes were produced by Osamu Yoshioka (吉岡 修) and the animation was directed by Yoshikatsu Kasai (笠井 由勝) from scripts by David Wise and Patti Howeth.

Bob Burden writes: within days of it airing it was apparent that the TMNT would prove every bit as popular for the television audience as it had been for the comic readers.

[7] Multiple other Turtles comics, toys, books, games, and other merchandising items have subsequently appeared, overseen and sometimes fully created by Eastman and Laird.

[citation needed] On June 1, 2000, Laird and the Mirage Group purchased Eastman's ownership in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles property and corporations.

Approaching Laird with his ideas, Eastman was met with a less than positive response: [M]y first thought was to expand the publishing arm of Mirage.

[7] Rick Veitch has written that: One of the plans was for Tundra to act as an exoskeleton for an existing self-publisher; offering marketing muscle, higher production values, printing costs paid and a page rate up front for half the action no strings attached.

Eastman says that he "thought that the audience was a lot larger than it actually was," citing his personal assumption that readers would "grow up through X-Men and discover The Sandman and then Dark Knight and Watchmen and beyond."

[7] Speaking in 1992/93, Eastman was optimistic that the company had "finally reached the point where [it had] slowed up enough... to be giving individual projects the time and attention they require[d].

[22] He also believed that part of Tundra's downfall was tied to his offering Marvel and DC employees the chance to work on creator-owned and personal projects.

He has stated in an interview that: In my personal opinion, we took away so many creams of the crops [sic] artists like Dave McKean, Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Rick Veitch, Mike Allred... [that] the two big companies had the power to go to the key distributors and made them short sell, under ship and ____ing bury these guys because now that Dave McKean is doing stuff at Tundra, the big publishers were losing money because Dave's not doing Arkham Asylum 2 and Alan Moore's not doing Watchmen 2, he's not doing Swamp Thing, but instead he's doing From Hell with Tundra.... Basically, we got the raw end of the deal.

[22]Kevin Eastman had been a longtime fan of the science fiction and fantasy magazine, much of whose content was translated from the French, and appeared in the original Métal Hurlant publication of which Heavy Metal is only the American-licensed incarnation.

"[7] Eastman also attempted to bring some European hardcover comics to America, using Heavy Metal to help serialize them and both defray the costs and boost readership.

"[7] Eastman sold the magazine to digital and music veteran David Boxenbaum and film producer Jeff Krelitz in January 2014.

Eastman has acted in a small number of films, including Guns of El Chupacabra in 1997 and The Rock n' Roll Cops in 2003.

[30] In the early 2000s Eastman was commissioned to create artwork for the drum kit used by System of a Down drummer John Dolmayan, an avid comic book collector and vendor.

[31] Eastman purchased his first piece of original artwork ("a couple of pages that were penciled by Michael Golden and inked by Bob McLeod for Marvel Comics' Howard the Duck") at the Atlanta Fantasy Fair, the convention he and Laird attended in 1984.