04-21-06

Comedy With a Side of Pain

I'm going to just jump out here and apologize to everyone who has a comic in the waiting list.  I have to do this review, despite the fact that the comic in question has only been on my trawl for about 6 weeks and has never been on the links page.  The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, by Chris Hastings and Kent Archer, is just that good.  Comics of this quality are so rare that I consider this a major scoop of  Tangents and Websnark.
          So what is Dr. McNinja about?  To quote the "About" page on Hastings's site, "Dr. McNinja is a doctor who is also a ninja."  Yup.  Seriously, though Dr. McNinja is an amazingly well-written and subtle absurdist comedy.  Hastings manages a deep sense of self-awareness in his story-telling without even approaching the fourth wall.  More to the point, he does it while keeping his comic well within the confines of the standards imposed on the print comics industry under the Comics Code Authority in the eighties and early nineties.
          It takes special skill to do what Hastings has done.  There are layers and layers within layers of parody in the scripting.  The whole comic is, obviously, a send up of  traditional superhero comics, and of the "ninja craze".  But there are more caricatures implied; in one comic, in a burlesque of TV's "Magic Doctors" (who can diagnose and treat everything regardless of their specialty), Dr. McNinja describes himself as a podiatrist while performing oral surgery.  In another, more recent comic, he mounts a velociraptor (like a horse - get your mind out of the gutter) and names it Yoshi.  And the subtlety and number of cultural references and parodies isn't even the amazing part.
          The amazing part is that Hastings manages to fit all those references in while telling a coherent and cohesive story.  Dr. McNinja is the eldest son of Mitzi and Dan McNinja, two surprisingly middle-class parents who tried to raise their boys to value traditional morals like obedience, honesty, and unnecessary bloodshed.  During the "youthful rebellion" phase of his life, he became a doctor, and is now a family practitioner of sorts.  But he can't escape his past.  The McNinja clan descends from an Irish village that, being raided by pirates, was saved by the serendipitous discovery that frost-covered shamrocks could be used as throwing stars.  A ninja observed their rout of the pirates and trained the people of the village in the fine art of ninjitsu.  Thus was clan McNinja born.
          Of course Dr. McNinja himself doesn't go out of his way to avoid the trouble that comes with being a McNinja.  His office is staffed by a gorilla, and his patients are decidedly odd.  The first issue of the comic featured a ten-year-old boy who was a victim of "Paul Bunyan's Disease."  He began by projectile-vomiting maple syrup, then grew into a 50-foot tall lumberjack.  Then the issue started getting weird.
          None of this silliness would work, however, if the art wasn't perfect, and believe me, it is.  Drawn as uncolored comic-book-style line art, Dr. McNinja is fantastic.  The stylized realism of the characters and backgrounds (pencilled by Hastings and inked by Archer) are reminiscent of Dick Giordano's work on Green Arrow and Batman.  they stay true to the Silver Age style, as well.  There are no chibi sweat drops, no unnecessary cut scenes with eye-crossing speed lines.  If it weren't for the lack of color, and the absurdity of the situations, it would be easy to believe that one was reading scans of a Marvel or DC trial series from the '80's.
          The site design is slick and tight, and very utilitarian.  All of the links work and they all go where they're supposed to go.  The archive links to issues of the comic and has helpful thumbnail pictures available above the descriptions.  Each page has the standard "next" and "previous" buttons for navigation, but also has a sidebar so the reader can jump to any page in the issue.
          Go read Dr. McNinja right now!!  Then swing by Tangents and tell Rob Howard that I beat him to it.
The Adventures of Dr. McNinja by Chris Hastings and Kent Archer
Updates: M/W/F
Caveats:  Absurdist humor, uncolored line art.
Rating: