The End of an Era - The Adventures of Doctor McNinja

In 2004, Christopher Hastings began publishing The Adventures of Doctor McNinja online. A few years back, he started getting professional comic-writing gigs from Marvel, and about a year ago announced that he would be winding up the story of Doctor McNinja.

As his name suggests, Doctor McNinja is a doctor from a family of ninjas (specifically, Irish Ninjas(1), although his mother is Jewish by birth,) who, having abandoned the family business of assassination and pursuing memetic fueds with pirates, heals the sick and fights - and also, if we're honest, commits a lot of - crime in the city of Cumberland, Maryland(2). Initially facing an eclectic gaggle of threats such as copyright trolling fast food clown Donald McBonald, 'American Ninja' Frans Rayner, velociraptor-riding palaeontologists, vengeful pirates and Dracula, he eventually found his nemesis in the form of King Radical, a super cool crimelord intent on making the world a more radical place.

After travelling into space and into the future with Cumberland's mayor, astronaut and chrononaut Chuck Goodrich, and thwarting Radical's attempts to merge the world with his own home in the Radical Lands, McNinja entered into a final duel with his enemy as King Radical managed to become President and used the power of his office to exact petty and extravagant revenge on those who had thwarted him over the years(3). It is a fight that will cost McNinja his clone brother, his family and his very identity; and perhaps his life.

Ninjas can't grab you if you're on fire. Tru fax.

The twelve years of The Adventures of Dr McNinja is probably as textbook an example of Cerebus Syndrome as you'll find without having to read past the first couple of volumes of Cerebus itself and into the crazy stuff(4). It runs from a weird little comic about a doctor who is also a ninja to something with a coherent arc plot and goes to some pretty dark places by the end. And yes, it's still about a doctor who is also a ninja, who fights a man who wears a crown and rides a motorbike and dreams of filling the world with dinosaur people and introducing proper, radical tennis, whose secretary is a gorilla named Judy, who studied with a clone of Benjamin Franklin and whose youthful ward has a resplendent moustache. It's been a real blast, and if you haven't done so already, maybe you should check out the archive; it's substantial, yet finite, and that's not something you can say of many webcomics.

Also, he does a team up with Axe Cop.

(1) While the 'Mc' prefix is more commonly associated with Scots names, the two countries share a lot of cultural roots, and 'O'Ninja' just doesn't pop the same way.
(2) By long-standing agreement, the local police won't pursue him for any crime as long as he can reach his office and call 'base'.
(3) Well, this feels ominously prescient now.
(4) Cerebus Syndrome is when a work gets more serious over time, rather then the author having a complete psychological collapse, although that also happened with Cerebus the Aardvark.