April O'Neil - Comics

Comics

In the original Mirage Comics storyline, April Harriet O'Neil (who originally sported a jumpsuit) was a skilled computer programmer and worked as an assistant for Baxter Stockman, helping to program his Mouser robots and demonstrating their operation. After she discovered that Baxter was using the Mousers to burrow into bank vaults and steal from them, she attempted to flee Baxter's workshop and found herself in the sewers running for her life, with several Mousers in pursuit. Three of the Turtles happened to come across her and save her; they later successfully fended off a Mouser invasion after Baxter programmed them to attack the Turtles.

April began to run an antique shop, which came under attack by The Shredder and the Foot Clan (who had come for the Turtles), and which was destroyed in the ensuing battle. She and the Turtles retreated to a farm house in Northampton, Massachusetts where she later had dreams about the Foot Clan's attack. During the mid-90s, April became romantically involved with Casey Jones and the two eventually adopted a child named Shadow.

In Volume 2 of the TMNT comics, April was attacked and injected by a huge robot controlled by Baxter Stockman's brain (apparently, Baxter having escaped capture, had placed his brain in the body of a robot and sought them out in order to get revenge on April). It wasn't revealed until Volume 4 that April was injected by nanobots that seemed to have caused sterility as well as nearly killing her from the inside. With the help of the Utroms, the turtles sent turtle versions of nanobots to stop Baxter's versions and saved April before they would reach her brainstem. Despite this, April remained sterile.

This put an emotional strain on April, and she became a female version of Nobody until she was discovered by Casey Jones. It was with the help of Renet taking her back in time that revealed that April was really a living drawing, brought to life with the help of Kirby's crystal, drawn by her father, who at the time really wanted a daughter. This was before their own biological daughter Robyn O'Neil would be born. Unlike Kirby's drawings drawn with pencil that would vanish after a while, April's father used a pen, so it might explain why April lived past thirty without vanishing so far. Questions such as if she was real or not, whether she could live or die, or when she would eventually vanish were too much for her to handle. April bid farewell to Shadow and Casey and went to be alone with her thoughts in Alaska.

Fan reaction was mixed, as many believed her normality served as a good contrast to the fantastic nature of the Turtles. No other incarnation of April has shared this origin to date.

Unlike some of the other versions of her character, the Mirage Comics version of April has dark brown/black hair (though early color reprints of Volume 1 depicted her hair color as red/light brown). Most future incarnations of April that came afterwards are redheads.

April also appeared in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures comic produced by Archie Comics, which began as re-tellings of cartoon episodes but were eventually spun off into original stories. In this series, she began as a carbon copy of her animated counterpart, but the writers developed her into a competent warrior after training with Splinter. Years earlier in the September, 1985 re-printing of issue one, Mirage Studios artist Ryan Brown depicts April as a katana wielding ninja warrior in his back cover pin-up. Because of her frequent adventures with the Turtles, she lost her job at Channel 6 and became a freelance reporter. Archie also published 2 sets of 3-part April O'Neil mini-series. In the Winter 1994 Archie Special, April was mutated into a turtle herself. This made April become the first official female turtle introduced to the series, three years before Venus de Milo's debut.

The second issue of the Dreamwave Productions series (based on the 2003 animated series) focused entirely on April, consisting of a dream sequence showing how she had been pressured into a scientific career by her family despite having interest in journalism, an obvious homage to the 1987 cartoon.