Thread:Yoshimickster/@comment-995426-20151104041829/@comment-995426-20151105011837

Oh, as for fanfiction, it's interesting you evaluate it like you do.

Remember me ever mentioning the Guest Era? It was all fanfiction, which is probably one of the biggest reasons IDW won't reprint it. Each of the creators were given a blank plot check and allowed to do pretty much whatever they wanted with it, and no one worried about canon. It wasn't until the Volume 4 era that Peter Laird delineated which stories were canon and which were non-canon (the entire Guest Era was non-canon).

And there have been other works that are technically fanfiction, albeit with different levels of involvement of Mirage staff. Image Volume 3 was eventually resolved in fanfiction online, and by the end, I think Kevin Eastman and Jim Lawson were participating pro bono. Eastman did the last cover art, Lawson contributed some other stuff... And there's also the Casey Jones fan movie which even snagged voices like Robbie Rist, but has apparently never been a licensed project and has been noncommercial.

But perhaps the single most successful TMNT fanfiction of all time, is Mutant Ninja Turtles Gaiden. Its writer and illustrator, Tigerfog, has never been licensed, and has never made a cent from his work, but he's been at it for over a decade, and has a healthy audience and reputation for it. It's even strongly suspected to have influenced licensed works that were written and produced later, though for legal liability, reasons neither Mirage nor Nickelodeon are likely to admit it.

Most if not all Turtlepedia's admins are past or present readers of MNTG (Sugilita for certain is still a regular reader), and it's one of the best-documented TMNT works on this wiki, though all its articles require that special disclaimer notice at the top. The admins are also are largely aware of these easter eggs, but Turtlepedia has a strict policy of not documenting easter eggs in the easter egg articles without official confirmation...which will not be forthcoming from Mirage or Nickelodeon in these cases no matter how true they may be. That's the nature of the legal beast.