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Underground > Comic Books >

Nth Man: The Ultimate Ninja

MattShepherd: I WEDDED KALI!

19:24 / 30.01.07

Surprisingly, a lot of 'lithers seem to remember and look fondly back upon the Nth Man, as evidenced in the third page of this thread.

13-year-old MattShepherd *&?%ing LOVED Nth Man. It came from Larry Hama, the only guy that could ever make something like G.I. Joe actually work (view any attempt after Hama's epic run at it), and was a... well, flat-out bizarre mix of speculative military fiction, full-blown SF, super-hero satire, and a massive injection of Sapir and Murphy's "Destroyer," right down the the wisecracking Asian sensei and the perpetually bemused and befuddled super-ninja hero.

I haven't read the series in years -- I'm sure I don't have copies any more -- but now that I'm thinking back on it, was it just me, or was it hella ahead of its time? A metafictional look at nuclear disarmament, psychic superminds (well, one, who chooses late in the series to dress like Galactus(!)), gender relations, the ex-Soviet Union, the merits of the nickname "Peachy," and lots and lots of guns.

Was the Nth Man great? Or am I seeing it through nostalgia-covered glasses?

WHITHER THE Nth MAN?

19:47 / 30.01.07

Larry Hama may be the greatest contemporary author of boy's adventure fiction.

'Nth Man' was that damn good.

I don't know about 'ahead of its time, but it certainly was a class-act for its time. And it had a little more faith in its audience than most Marvel books of the era.

More later.

12:16 / 31.01.07

I'm going for great as well - the issue with Alfie as Galactus stamping on toy soldiers was a particular favourite. It was around the time that comics were very very popular at school, and people would often get an issue of Nth Man and just be confused by it - a friend of mine really championed it, and lent me his collection of the run, I have very fond memories of it because of this maybe more than the series itself - maybe a re-look is in order. Has anyone got it to hand to read now? Or are we all relying on distant memory?

12:50 / 31.01.07

DUUDDEE!! Lo, long have i cried out in the wilderness, the Nth Man doth rock, and now my faith is finally rewarded![Sniff]
I Loved that book, and anything and everything Hama did, GI Joe included but excluding his Batman Stuff. That was not a good fit for him.

On a slightly more serious note, does anyone have a complete run of the series, i couldnt get them here in South Africa, and i cant afford to buy them over the internet. WTF happens in #16?

MattShepherd: I WEDDED KALI!

15:26 / 31.01.07

Hmm. You can pick 'em up for seventy-five cents to a dollar per issue at the Mile High site, Americans, but the shipping to Canada gets kinda sick.

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

15:53 / 31.01.07

Might have a looky-loo while I'm at the shop tomorrow.

16:11 / 31.01.07

Did any of you know that Larry Hama once showed up as a captured Korean soldier in M*A*S*H*? Seems he was an extra on TV shows and films before making it as a comics scribe.

MattShepherd: I WEDDED KALI!

16:38 / 31.01.07

Oddly, I heard about his acting career on the... commentary track? for... Drunken Master? Whoever it was doing the commentary had been turned onto Chinese gung-fu movies by Larry Hama as the closest thing in the world to real live super-heroes, IIRC. I could be totally mangling this in my mind, though.

02:05 / 01.02.07

yeah, if anyone wants one i can flick them the stuff on a CD. Or gmail it to ya or something. pm me. i torrented it recently and did a big reread in a two-week period.

i remember being perplexed by it as a fourteen-year-old, and twenty years on it's still pretty weird. but it does have a coherent thing going on. it feels creator-owned in a way that i don't think was happening much around then.

i don't know anything about Larry Hama outside of this and he created Orca the Whale Woman.

but yeah, nth man. wow. um... it seems to be going along a path that's all about realistic depictions of violence. I mean - the scene where all the burning-to-death people inside the tanks after the huge tank battle freak out the field hospital nurse so that she drops the IV of blood? There seemed to be a kind of antiwar thing going on there, and then it went all space-hopping superhero up until the end, with a bit of mad max...

i don't know if it's coherent, but it's heller interesting in that 'Shoosh, the guy's actually tryna SAY something' way.

so. tell me more of this larry hama.

Haus of Mystery

12:40 / 02.02.07

Didn't Larry Hama write 'The 'Nam'? comic. You know, the one with the bright yellow, buck-toothed, oh-so evil Vietnamese characters?

Strikes me his politics might not be that far left of old Chuck 'the Fuck' Dixon et al.

MattShepherd: I WEDDED KALI!

13:44 / 02.02.07

Hama edited The 'Nam. Which wasn't all that right-wing, to be honest and IIRC; a lot of what was supposed to go in the series was hamstrung by Comics Code and corporate interference, but it was pretty harsh about what it was like there and what the Americans were doing there in the first place.

Hama himself -- I'd bet he's got right-wingy tendencies, for sure. I mean, G.I. Joe wasn't exactly a nuanced examination of the corrupting power of military force, it was a bunch of action-loving yahoos who fought an eeeeevil terrorist organization. I remember that Nth Man had a fuzzy gung-ho-ness underlying it... the government was ineffective and corrupt, and it was a kinda post-apocalyptic world where it was Every Man For Himself and Military Might was Necessary to Build a Better World.

I have a weird sense that Hama both writes right-wing and at the same time kind of self-satirizes, because he knows he's wandering so far OTT that it gets a bit ridiculous. That's really just conjecture, though.

MattShepherd: I WEDDED KALI!

13:57 / 02.02.07

Hmm. Now I'm a bit creeped out thinking that I don't even remember how the Vietnamese in The 'Nam were portrayed. The fact that I don't is probably a bad sign...