Okay, kids: It’s Confession Time.
Despite the fact that I’ve known about it for more than a couple of years, I don’t actually read The Adventures of Dr. McNinja on a regular basis. I realized the first time I saw it that while every page was worth seeing, Christopher Hastings and Kent Archer were telling stories that would just read better in big chunks, and so after I read the initial story of Dr. McNinja’s battle against Paul Bunyan’s disease, I filed it away as something to come back to later and blow through in one shot.
And then I promptly got distracted by… I don’t know, putting together a run of Power Man and Iron Fist or something. You know how I am. Point is, I never got around to reading it until I saw Kent Archer at HeroesCon and picked up the first two trades. What can I say? It’s just another example of my weird desire to pay for things that I could read for free on the Internet, and as someone who writes things for free on the Internet, I’m fully aware of the irony here.
But that doesn’t matter, because it turns out that that purchase was probably the best thirty bucks I’d ever spent, because this…
…is the most awesome thing I have ever read.
And that’s not to say that the first volume isn’t great; it’s pretty much non-stop awesome and even includes references to Fitness Celebrity John Basedow, but the second one… man.
For those of you unfamiliar with the premise–and at this point, I’m pretty sure I’m the last person to write about it–here’s the short version:
Dr. McNinja is a doctor who is also a ninja, and is therefore torn between his need to heal and his need to kill. He has a gorilla receptionist named Judy, a dinosaur named Yoshi, and by the end of the first trade, he’s got a kid sidekick named Gordito who grew a moustache through sheer force of will.
And this is his dad, Dan:
When the second volume picks up with a story called D.A.R.E. To Resist Ninja Drugs and Ninja Violence–and I cannot tell you how hard I love this book for that alone–Dan recruits his son to battle Franz Rayner, a Danish action movie star who singlehandedly wiped out most of the American Ninja population in the ’80s, and who is now manufacturing a drug that turns ordinary people into ninjas so that he has more ninjas to kill, which will of course lead to him becoming President.
And if that sentence didn’t blow your mind, then this will:
I don’t know if this was the comic Christopher Hastings and Kent Archer were born to make, but I’m pretty sure it’s the comic I was born to read.
So for the love of God, if you haven’t already, go read it, or even better, buy the trade, which features a bonus story written by Friend of the ISB Benito Cereno that climaxes in a panel so awesome that I was literally–yes, literally–crying from laughing so hard when I read it.
Because seriously: It is the single greatest use of ninjas since the video for Total Eclipse of the Heart.
