Cowabunga! New England town celebrates being the birthplace of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

DOVER, N.H.-- As the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles grew to become a pop culture sensation, the place where they were conceived rarely got mentioned.It wasn't the New York City sewers, where the Turtles mutated from regular reptiles into a crime-fighting quartet who battled foes with nunchucks, snark and pizza.

Rather, it was a small city near the New Hampshire coast.A new exhibit hopes to put that community, Dover, New Hampshire, at the center of the Turtles' story and, in turn, attract Turtle-obsessed fans or anyone else who grew up reading the comics and watching Ninja Turtles movies and TV shows.At one point in the 1980s, the frenzy around the Turtles was called Turtlemania.“It's the birthplace,” said Kevin Eastman, who, along with Peter Laird, created the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 41 years ago when the two shared a house in Dover.

The first issue went on sale a year later.“That’s where the Turtles were created.

...It is very historic and very important to us.”The Turtles' exhibit opened last month at the Woodman Museum, which houses an eclectic collection that includes a stuffed polar bear and a Victorian funeral exhibit replete with a horse-drawn hearse.With its explosion of colors and cabinets full of action figures, the exhibit aims to be the place to go for all things Turtles.

It starts with franchise's humble beginnings in Dover, where the duo formed Mirage Studios, a play on the fact they were creating the first comic in their living room rather than an actual studio.Inspired by Eastman's fascination with turtles and martial arts, they came up with the crime-fighting Turtles and self-published their first comic in black and white.

“We hoped that one day we would sell enough copies of our 3,000 printed, $1.50 comic books that we could pay my uncle back,” Eastman said, adding that they had no intention of writing a second issue until fans asked for more.“We loved our characters.We loved what we did.

We told the best story we could.We...