User blog comment:TheNightNews/That Moment You ALL Missed In TMNT Season 1/@comment-995426-20160524034120/@comment-995426-20160524062534

Zakor1138:

An understandable position to take. Fanfiction can vary wildly in quality and substance.

But MNT Gaiden is worthy of unique mention for the sheer impact it has made on TMNT fan consciousness. Most of the Turtlepedia admins have been fans or otherwise readers of the comic. Its corpus is over 800 pages long, longer than some entire volumes of official TMNT comics. And though it's generally frowned upon for official works to draw influence from fanworks because of legal liability issues, some official works are widely believed to have been done so anyway, simply because their writers and artists don't live in a bubble.

Mirage TMNT&mdash;itself originally an independent comic with humble origins&mdash;also had a history of giving an audience to unofficial comics by various artists and writers, which they reprinted in the Guest Era and in Turtle Soup. Even one of the Tales of the TMNT backup comics was made by several college students in training.

MNT Gaiden has never been printed in a Mirage publication, but it has been going strong for well over a decade now, retaining a loyal audience without earning so much as a penny in revenue.

So does MNT Gaiden count? Official, perhaps not. But gather a bunch of hardcore TMNT comics readers in a room, and you can't throw a shuriken without hitting someone who has read at least part of it.