April O'Neil's character design

[AlZarkovski]

Originally Posted by neatoman

Her first appearence had a jumpsuit and a similar haircut to the cartoon:

And here's the cover by Richard Corben, still made well before the cartoon was in production. It's basically the same design aside from the color of the jumpsuit:

I know David Wise said Fujiko was an inspiration (though I can't really get a source on when and where he said it), but David Wise was known for straight up lying in interviews to make himself seem more important to the TMNT franchise than he really was, I seriously he'd ever admit the character designers probably just used Corben's design as a basis.

I don't think David Wise was lying. He just made a mix of designs from April Mirage and Fujiko. The basis of the design was definitely taken from Mirage, but some of the elements (yellow jumpsuit, white boots and light anime styling) were taken from Fujiko. There is one particular episode that Wise was talking about and I definitely see similarities in this particular version of Fujiko with April.