Obi-Wan Shinobi

“What do you mean I can’t keep him?” Timmy moans.

Oh, the heartbreak of a fifth-grader. The common childhood lament of losing out on a pet is one of several dramatic hurdles that Timothy James McAllister must clear in a scrappy new manga book geared to the middle-school set. Except this particular prized possession isn’t as cuddly as a puppy. It’s not even a snake in a shoebox.

Timmy’s found himself a full-grown East Asian assassin, which leads his unflappable parents to counsel: “Son, owning a ninja is a big responsibility.”

And that, in a nutshell, is the smile-inducing premise behind Mail Order Ninja (Tokyopop, $5.99), whose breezy 96 pages are written by Chicagoan Joshua Elder and drawn by Knoxville, Tennessee, resident Erich Owen. We’d call their brainchild a comic, but as Timmy amusingly points out: “Mom, it’s not a comic book! It’s a graphic novel! Jeez!”

Of course, it’s not quite what most people imagine when they think “graphic novel” either. Although it sports clever literary touches for adults, this isn’t an award-winning opus for grown-ups by Art Spiegelman or Chris Ware, and it’s not capes ’n’ tights from industry superheroes Alan Moore or Grant Morrison.But who cares what you call it—Elder knows his target audience: “kids, their parents and college hipsters who can be in on the joke.”

The germ of the idea came to Elder, 26, a few years back while he was studying film at Northwestern. He was brainstorming about a live-action short, and he thought, What if you could order a ninja from those ads in the back of comics, like the X-ray specs and kooky magic tricks? He couldn’t imagine any way to make the film on a student budget, so he set it aside. Then life tossed a few painful shuriken at him.

“The day before I turned 22, I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma,” Elder recalls. “As far as cancers go, Hodgkin’s is a good one to get. It has a very high survival rate, and obviously I’m here, but it was a tough time. I was holding down two desk jobs, working about 50, 55 hours a week and undergoing seven months of chemotherapy.”

As life-threatening events are wont to do, Elder’s early face-down with mortality brought some prioritizing. So, while battling cancer, he turned away from film and back to his true passion: comics. “There’s absolutely really nothing else in the world that I cared about like comics. It’s my favorite medium, bar none,” he says. “I hated writing screenplays…. [With comics,] a writer gets to exercise much more artistic license and put more of himself into it.”

He turned his idea for Mail Order Ninja into a comic script, and two years later, through the Internet, he hunted for an artist. “I got a lot of responses, and Erich was far and away the best,” Elder says. Although they’ve only met once, a year ago at the Wizard World convention, they communicate though phone and e-mail regularly. “We get on really well. He’s amazing. What I see in my head isn’t as good as what he puts on the page.”

Their initial 20-page short-form Ninja won the grand prize in Tokyopop’s fifth Rising Stars of Manga contest last year. That led to their publishing deal, which will produce a series of at least six Ninja volumes. (Warning: The first story line was split into halves, so part one ends on a cliffhanger; you’ll have to wait for part two in December for the resolution.)

Time will tell if Ninja is the hit Elder and Tokyopop are hoping for, but one thing’s for sure: He understands his craft. “The best kids stories are the ones that turn on a dime between being really funny and being really scary and suspenseful, where you’re really afraid that the villain’s going to win,” Elder says. Look for “very real danger” in December. That, and a couple pages of hilarious ninja disco dancing.

Elder promises not to bring any long, sharp blades to his in-store appearance Saturday 12.