The Adventures of Dr. McNinja

"I just surfed a robo Dracula from the moon, so yalls can just take it!"

- Dr. McNinja, and yes, he did! (He Is A Ninja!)


The ballooning range of internet service during the '90s tech boom years greatly loosened publishers' and broadcasters' stranglehold on human creativity. Storage and bandwidth costs notwithstanding, the relatively dirt cheap distribution of online content (like that which you'se a-gawkin' ats right 'ere, gentle reader) and potential for unlimited popularity lured many a would-be creator to post stories, drawings and whatever in hopes of [the] adulation and esteem [which would be mine by rights if you lazy asses would do your job and make me rich and famous already!] The results, as can still be seen today, consisted mostly of self-indulgent fan fictions by semi-literate egomaniacs, artwork by scribblers capable of producing neither art nor work, and waayyyy more furry porn than any observer could've rationally predicted.

Most of the webcomics dating from the '90s and early 2000s have vanished into the festering bowels of teh interwebz, where most of them belonged. Nostalgia aside, I can't say human culture lost much by the endless reams of incomprehensible pencil sketches of characters of indeterminate species tossing out cribbed non-sequiturs. Most took the internet's creative freedom to mean they didn't need to make sense, only to make noise. It's all about being outrageous and radical to the max... in that utterly predictable fashion so characteristic of college students.

That's how The Adventures of Dr. McNinja started. The concept itself is basically a throwaway one-liner you'd chuckle about with your friends on the street and forget by the time you got home: so, like, there's this Irish-American ninja, and he's also a doctor - hilarious, amirite? In itself, this fulfilled the "anything goes" promise of both comic books and the web, of a medium which is both malleable enough to support inchoate ramblings and doesn't take itself so seriously as to hold back from rambling. Whatever crackpot notions you have, toss 'em out there.

Unfortunately, to be more than yesterday's joke also requires developing those initial smatterings of intrigue. Freedom is nothing without the ability to make something of it. Unfortunatelier, there's nowhere to take a notion like Dr. McNinja... in itself. The character himself is the punchline. So early chapters simply pile on other absurdism about dinosaurs or facial hair or, of course, more and more ninjas. Much of it, like the ninjas vs. pirates rivalry, was pathetically lifted from endlessly reiterated online subculture. I tried trudging through it last decade, shrugged and gave up at about the fifteenth desperate, nonsensical, misguided stab at creativity.

But, eventually, it got good. Like Sluggy Freelance, McNinja eventually demonstrated the necessary skill to cobble its underlying derivative nonsense into something resembling plot and character development. More interesting, while retaining quite of bit of randomness (even its climactic battle involves a weaponized pope-grenade) the second half of the comic increasingly turned against the forced badassery of its early days, especially where "the radical land" and its denizens are concerned. That it ran its last storyline about radicalization and the presidency in 2015-2017 may or may not have had something to do with it. Regardless, the finished comic stands as something both memorable and reflective of the post-Y2K cultural milieu while avoiding the retreat into trite, staid moralism plaguing most of its contemporaries. It made a point to repeatedly explode its old pirate conflict cliche, never descended into mating ritual drama and eschewed too sappy an ending.

Human creativity has largely proven itself incapable of dealing with the internet's overdose of creative freedom. But, if Dr. McNinja can be interpreted in any way, it's as proof that the freedom itself was not the problem, but only the desperation to make more noise than the competition, to out-radicalize each other.