April O'Neil is a fictional character from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics. She is the first human ally of the Turtles: Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, and Michelangelo. April made her first appearance in the Mirage comic series in 1984 as a computer programmer. She was later portrayed as a strong-willed news reporter in the Turtles' first animated series, as a warrior in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures comic produced by Archie Comics, and various other personas in different TMNT media.
Mirage Comics
In the original Mirage Comics storyline for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, April O'Neil was a skilled computer programmer and assistant to a famous yet nefarious scientist, Baxter Stockman. She helped program his MOUSER robots but, after discovering Baxter was using them to burrow into bank vaults, she fled his workshop. Robots chased her into the sewer where she was promptly saved by three of the Turtles. The Turtles later successfully fended off a MOUSER invasion.  After leaving her job with Baxter, April decided to open an antique shop. The shop was subsequently destroyed in a battle between the Turtles and Shredder and the Foot Clan. April and the Turtles retreated to a farm house in Northampton, Massachusetts to recover and during this time she suffered recurrent nightmares about the Foot Clan's attack. During the mid-1990s, April became romantically involved with the violent vigilante Casey Jones, and the two of them eventually raised Shadow, the child of Casey's late wife Gabrielle, as their own.  In Volume 2 of the TMNT comics, April was attacked by a huge robot controlled by the brain of her former boss, Baxter Stockman, and injected with nanobots. With the help of the Utroms, the Turtles injected April with turtle versions of nanobots to stop Baxter's plan. The intervention saved April before Baxter's nanobots could reach her brain stem and kill her. The attack rendered April sterile. To deal with the emotional strain she became a female version of "Nobody", a vigilante crime fighter, until her identity was discovered by Casey Jones. With the help of Renet, a time-traveler who took April back through time, it was revealed that April was really a living drawing brought to life with the help of Kirby's crystal. She was drawn by her father before his own biological daughter Robyn O'Neil was born. Although Kirby drew with pencil that would vanish after a while, April's father used a pen, which might explain why April lived past thirty without vanishing. Questions of realness and morality were too much for April; she bid farewell to Shadow and Casey and travelled to Alaska to be alone with her thoughts. Although the trip helped April cope with her demons and led to her eventual return to New York, her family history remained unexplored.  The Mirage Studios version of April has dark brown/black hair (though early color reprints of Volume 1 depicted her hair color as red/light brown). Most subsequent incarnations of April are redheads. In the September 1985 re-printing of issue one, artist Ryan Brown depicts April as a katana-wielding ninja warrior in his back cover pin-up.
Who was Mirage Comics?
In the original Mirage Comics storyline for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, April O'Neil was a skilled computer programmer
In the original Mirage Comics storyline for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, April O'Neil was a skilled computer programmer