Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-995426-20160808122254/@comment-995426-20160815161219

Farceface: It's actually pretty complicated. Some of the works are side projects that involved official people. The TMNT comics scene since the beginning has always been smaller, less profitable, relatively more intimate between creators and audience. TMNT was originally an independent comic for adults, after all, and remained a relatively small-scale operation even as licensed merchandise, cartoons, video games and movies took off at big companies (mostly for much younger audiences). And since TMNT's fan base and audience is as splintered as it is (with so little mutual overlap), it is usually not at all obvious to a purely cartoon-related fan just what a small world the TMNT comics scene has truly been.
 * The most extreme example of this are Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles issue 24 (Image) and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles issue 25 (Image), which are technically fan works, but involved talents like Arseniy Dubakov, Kevin Eastman and Jim Lawson.
 * Then there's Mutant Ninja Turtles Gaiden, which is a fan work in the purest sense, but has become so popular and so well-read by TMNT comics fans that it's too widely known to completely ignore, and certainly has its own devoted fans (and fan fiction and fan art too of its own, too). MNTG has had a bigger audience than many minor licensed works, and there have been documented cases of licensed works using ideas very eerily similar to those that appeared in MNTG first.  MNTG is a proverbial elephant in the room&mdash;we ignore it at our own tone-deafness. XD
 * And then there's very small scale fan works like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Steven and Carson's Books), which I think User:The S co-created when he was a child. (Is that correct?)