Hi there! Is this thing on...?
OK, fabulous.
Ninja High School!!
Thanks for coming to my TED talk. Don't forget to hit that upvote button on the way out, remember to tip your servers generously, and--
I'm kidding. Good lord, you think I could write a single post about comics that didn't clock in at several thousand words? Buddy, you've got a lot of learning to do. Fortunately school's in session.
Ninja High School.
And brother, I am hyped for reasons I'll get to in a minute. First, let's talk about this post's title.
The early years of Ninja High School are complicated. Not as complicated, fortunately, as, say, the chronology of Everette Hartsoe's Razor to use a completely non-random example, but annoying enough that it can be tough to collect if you don't know what you're looking at.
The subject of today's post is Ninja High School #1, which is a key issue for my collection I just managed to scratch off the 'want' list. Let's punch the time machine back to 1987, throw on some period-appropriate tunes to set the mood...
...and talk about this silly book for a bit.
Unless otherwise indicated, all images in this article are scanned from my own sources.
Ninja High School #1
So here's the deal...there is only one Ninja High School #1, but there are three different printings of it by two different companies, so let's break them down.
That cover you see above is the OG Ninja High School #1, published by Antarctic Press in 1987. As you can see from the cover, Ben Dunn's intention for this book was to make it a three-issue miniseries, with a goofy, harem-style plotline inspired by numerous manga and anime.
A "harem" story, for those unfamiliar with the term, is one where numerous people are all competing for the attention, love, or bodily fluids of one specific individual, often for bizarre/comedic reasons. In the case of Ninja High School, this individual is Jeremy Feeple, an average teenager attending Quagmire High School in the "could be anywhere" town of Quagmire in the United States.
Competing for his attention are Ichi-kun Ichinohei, a highly-trained ninja of the Ichinohei clan, who must convince Jeremy to propose to her as a condition of her eventual inheritance: leadership of the ninja family which bears her name. Normally this wouldn't be a problem for a ninja as skilled as she, but her competition is Princess Asrial of the Salusian Royal Family, the heads of the Interstellar Conglomerate. The Salusians, a race of highly-advanced anthropomorphic skunks, desire for Earth to join the Conglomerate. The peace offering they are presenting is their daughter; the randomly-selected individual they have chosen to be her spouse to cement the new relationship between the planets is (wait for it. . .!) Jeremy Feeple.
Hilarity and hijinks ensue.
This version of issue #1 is printed in black and white, save for the cover, and the paper is Antarctic Press's standard (for the time period) newsprint-quality. As an indie book with an untested idea for a small market, AP printed 8,500 copies of this issue, making it reasonably uncommon but far from impossible to find. It also contains a short backup story which wasn't reprinted in subsequent editions of the book, so people who want everything NHS-related will definitely want to be on the lookout for this one.
Ninja High School did so well that Antarctic Press printed a fourth issue, which culminated in the promise of an on-going series to follow. Because he was working on several other projects, and didn't want to strain Antarctic Press's minimal resources and time further, Dunn found Malibu comics willing to handle the duties of printing and distribution for the on-going series under their "Eternity" imprint, which handled independent, creator-owned, and international books. This would result in Ninja High School receiving much wider distribution, but Malibu didn't want to start printing books with issue #5, so their first order of business was to reprint issues 1 through 4, and from that we got our second issue #1:
While Malibu/Eternity did not submit their books for approval by the Comics Code Authority, they still had their own rules and restrictions about what they would and would not print. These restrictions forced Dunn to re-draw or edit some of his previous artwork in order to remove some brief nudity. Dunn also redrew a number of panels due to his style having changed across the four books, thus updating characters (especially Asrial) to their then-current looks. Eternity also introduced a couple of mistakes on their own, including mirror-flipping the very first page of the comic for unknown reasons. So while this is the same story, it isn't exactly the same book. But don't worry, it gets sillier!
In 1992, with sales of the book successful enough to allow for it and demand from new fans rising due to the difficulty of obtaining earlier issues of the series, Eternity began reprinting the book as Ninja High School in Color. Originally, the plan was to just reprint the first five issues, but sales were strong enough that Eternity went ahead and added it to their regular release schedule. Dunn provided the cover art for the first issue, which was a redrawn and updated version of his cover for the original Eternity #1, and thus came our third Ninja High School #1:
There were no interior panels re-drawn or re-worked for this edition, it's literally just the first #1 with colorist Joseph Allen handling the interior colors. They didn't even un-mirror the first page to correct their original mistake, which seems like a missed opportunity to me, but hey, I wasn't in charge. Malibu eventually released 13 issues of Ninja High School in Color. They would have done more, except that Malibu was bought by Marvel Comics in 1993, and publication rights to Ninja High School reverted to Ben Dunn following the printing of issue #39 in August of 1993, which had effectively "ended" the series.
With one of his original titles now back in his hands, and Antarctic Press no longer the fledgling studio it was back in 1987, AP resumed publication of Ninja High School with first an issue #0 "prequel" story in May of 1994 set in some of the "off-screen" periods of issue #1, then followed it up with issue #40 the next month, bearing the tagline "We're Back!" at the bottom, returning the series to regular bimonthly publication, where it has remained ever since. In fact, the series is closing in on two hundred issues as of this writing, and shows no signs of slowing down.
Of course, as this kick-started interest in the book anew, Antarctic Press began issuing "The Collected Ninja High School" series of trades, which reprinted the entire Eternity run of the book, in black-and-white, starting with this one right here:
So there you have it: a concise history of Ninja High School and its crazy #1s. As the longest-running Ameri-manga series of all time, there's far more here than any single post could cover. But if you were looking for a good starting-off point, or were confused about why some issues are in color while others are in black-and-white, I hope this helps with your collecting efforts.
If you'd like to know more about Ninja High School, I wrote a more detailed post about the series last year, and hey, that tip jar is still open, so. . . :D
Otherwise, thanks for sharing more full-frontal nerdity with me on this Labor Day weekend, long live the 90s-era, and I'll see you soon for another peek into Michael's Long Box.