April O'Neil - the Fifth Turtle

Meet the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle who's not a ninja and not a teenager! Who is the mysterious fifth Turtle? Why, it's none other than April O'Neil! In 1994's TMNT Adventures Special #11, the Turtles and all their friends threw a surprise party for Splinter's birthday. April, thinking about how much he must miss being human, decided to look into a company she'd read about that was doing work on an anti-mutagen. When she visited the lab, she found it had been taken over by alien agents who decided to use her as a test subject. But before they could un-mutate her, they had to mutate her first, coincidentally picking the one animal with which she had the most familiarity. Kudos to original artist Brian Thomas for not giving Turtle-April any mammalian sexual characteristics - that is to say, she doesn't have long hair, she doesn't have big eyelashes, she doesn't have a narrow waist, her shell isn't shaped to suggest boobs... she's just a mutant turtle, shaped like the rest of them. If you want to really get into it, the underside (or front, on a Ninja Turtle) of male turtles' shells is more concave than the females' are, but the TMNT don't generally bother with that, so the biggest morphological difference beteen April and, say, Raphael, is that she's got sharp claws on the ends of all her fingers instead of flat stumps. Long fingernails, maybe? You can also count her mouth, maybe? After getting turned into a turtle, April does specifically call out her claws and beak, and the boys do generally have smooth lips, while the one in the art (and therefore the one sculpted on this toy) comes to more of a point right in the center. That's a subtle change, but a change it is nonetheless. The figure actually includes multiple heads. And hands, but that's less unusual. I guess the thought process is that with the boys, they're always going to be likely to release more figures of them at any time in the future, so they can be given different expressions then, but that when it comes to April, this is their one shot at her, so they'd better load her down with as much as possible right away. Three of the heads wear her identity-concealing bandana. Since this was 20 years before there'd be a Jennika, her color is white rather than yellow. Considering "a fifth Turtle shows up somehow" has to be one of the most common pitches TMNT writers try to make, maybe they were saving yellow for a story that counted? White is much more boring, though it doesn't exactly come out of nowhere: Archie Splinter wore a white Storm Shadow ninja suit those times when he would have to go on a mission with the kids, so white was already established as the books' "special guest fighter" color. Or lack of color, as the case may be. Anyway, the bandana'd heads include one that's smiling theateningly, one that's got the mouth open in anger, and one that does both those things on opposite sides. The fourth head, however, shows April without her mask at all, from when she was first mutated and stuck in a cage, so on that one she looks very sad. When she didn't yet have her mask she also didn't have pads or a belt with her initial on it, but there's no way for this toy to do that. If you want a fully naked April O'Neil, you'll just have to settle for Redtube. On the cover of the comic, the mysterious "Fifth Turtle" is shaded in entirely black, like Raphael's wrestling costume, and wore a belt with a question mark in the center; in the story, her belt had a large A for her name, but does that mean they already had a belt for her laying around in the Turtle Lair, or did they make a new one really fast? The letter is fully sculpted, just like all the boys get. She's also got the same articulation: swivel/hinge ankles, double-hinged knees, swivel thighs, balljointed hips, swivel/hinge wrists, double-hinged elbows, swivel biceps, swivel/hinge shoulders, balljointed neck, and barbell head. The bandana ties swap between the various heads, so there's a swivel where those plug in, too. Jennika's signature weapon was a pair of tekko-kagi claws; when TMNT 2012 wanted to make April a fighter, they gave her a tessen war fan; but coming up with an original weapon is hard, particularly in a single 28-page story, so Turtle April just carries a katana with a scabbard. Kinda boring, honestly. If "there's a new Turtle" is the most common idea writers want to explore, then "April gets turned into a mutant" has to be the second-most, and this one issue of the comic managed to combine them both. Honestly, it probably should have been in the main storyline, somewhere it could be given a few issues' space of room to breathe, where we could really have time to sit with April's feelings about her new situation rather than having to speedrun through them. But for a one-shot tale where she still spent the entire first half as human, the fact those things were considered at all is impressive. And let's hear it for NECA deciding to take those 10 pages of ninja-fied April O'Neil and make a full and complete action figure out of her! -- 01/08/26 What would you mutate April into? Tell us on our message board, the Loafing Lounge.