Wingnut never showed up in the Mirage comics, and yet Archie's TMNT Adventures #8 was still not his first appearance.
When created by Ryan Brown, Wingnut was just a Batman pastiche (with no Screwloose to be his Robin). He wore a thick grey suit, leaving only his head blue, and his "wings" were really more of a cape with rocket boosters on it:
That obviously changed for the comic, and drastically changed for the toy (and subsequently the cartoon), but the original design did have an in-fiction appearance before that happened.
In 1989, Ralston Purina - yes, the dog food company - got the TMNT license and released a breakfast cereal that tasted exactly as good as you would expect a breakfast cereal released by a dog food company to taste. Well, every cereal needs a prize inside, and in the case of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Cereal, that prize was a mini-comic. There were three volumes, with an ongoing story that ran between them: Shredder kidnapped Casey Jones, the Turtles had to rescue him. What, what d'ya want, each "page" is a single panel, there's not a lot of room for complex storytelling.
Anyway, in addition to being the only comicbook appearance of Baxter Stockman as a fly, this "series" also featured Man Ray and Wingnut, probably because those were the only new characters who were approved early enough to be included. Wingnut was in issue #2, as a villain, but he was based on the original Ryan Brown design, with a few updates:
(The "script" for the issue - technically just a series of rough thumbnails in storyboard format - calls him "Jet-Bat XD-11," and he dresses more like an astronaut than a superhero, so clearly ideas were still in flux at this stage.)
The mini-comics were all written and drawn by Peter Laird himself, making this the only time he'd handle some of these characters. Plus, since they beat TMNT Adventures to publication by a few months, they serve as the true first appearance of Wingnut (and Man Ray) before their personalities were really nailed down.
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