YMMV / The Adventures of Dr. McNinja

• Alternative Character Interpretation: The narrative encourages wildly varying interpretations of the main characters.
  • Is Doc a hero, a villain, or a Well-Intentioned Extremist? He kills without mercy (and often unnecessarily) and opposes King Radical out of what is clearly a personal vendetta as opposed to plain heroism. Of course, it turns out that he's right about King Rad having nefarious plans.
  • Is King Radical an Anti-Villain, a hero, or a Villain with Good Publicity? He is doing his best to make the world as a whole (and Cumberland) in particular a more awesome place to live in, but he acts like a mafia don and recruits criminals. In the "All the King's Dirtbikes and All the King's Men" arc, it's revealed that Rad is trying to transform Doc's world into a new Radical land, but is actually a version of Chuck Goodrich, flipping the scale back and forth between villainous and heroic.
• Ass Pull:
  • The Doctor is trained to fight in his sleep, Gordito ended up with a black eye, and he mentioned waking up killing goons once thanks to this training. Fortunately, the president has agents with gentlest of hands, so it's not a problem.
  • Doc being able to one-shot Mongo the Uber-Ninja because it's like a video game. Even going by that logic, Doc had only fought Mongo once (and lost), and in his previous appearance was still powerless against him.
• Crazy Is Cool:
  • The title character shows moments of being somewhat mentally unbalanced, but always in ridiculously cool ways. For instance, in one arc he is inspired to go rescue his estranged family from a shipload of pirates by a talking roast turkey, who explicitly tells him that it's an illusion. In the next arc, he attempts to find out how a Velociraptor got into his office by busting through a skylight in a warehouse and accosting some random burly types, because his decision-making process is based on "What Would Batman Do?" He comes by this honestly, as his father's favorite way of evading pursuit is to set himself on fire, because, "They can't grab me if I'm on fire."
  • A good example here. The Amazing Flying Shooting Juan. What, you thought he missed?
    Man: (after getting off the phone) That was the police. The man who robbed my house... they finally caught him because he was shot in the upper thigh... There was a Queen of Diamonds in his pocket.
    Circus Carney: THE AMAZING, FLYING, SHOOTING JUAN, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN!
  • And from that trope's page:
    Dr. McNinja: Oh. How stupid of me. That was the sound of chainsaw nunchucks.
  • Dr. McNinja jumps off the moon, completely unassisted, carrying a Dracula-bot, and then proceeds to SURF said Dracula-bot to Earth's surface.
  • McNinja cheated death with a Shut Up, Hannibal! and a well-placed left hook.
  • In Futures trading, King Radical and Co. managed to print off the internet just before the super intelligent dinosaurs shut it down.
  • It would be easier to list what isn't Crazy Is Cool in this comic. But then, that's probably mostly uninteresting stuff.
  • You know stuff gets crazy when the random ramblings of a chatbot sound like what a real person in that universe would say. "Dumped me in favor of a man whose abdominal muscles were so well developed, they mutated into organic jetpacks" sounds perfectly normal.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Happens a lot.
  • The ending of "Judy Gets A Kitten" is probably the best example. If you think you could never laugh at a Velociraptor trying to eat a kitten, you're wrong.
  • One of the Robster's henchmen: Derek calling Dr. McLuchador a slur?^* Granted it was censored Not cool. Doc's reaction? Hilarious.
• Draco in Leather Pants: King Radical was simply too awesome and did have a reason for the evil he was doing during most of the story, even then his plans to improve the town has some benefits. When the comic shows his true colors, a petty mass murderer with no empathy for the universe he lives in, letters defending him stopped according to an alt text.
• Fan Nickname: When the president appeared, immediate comparisons were drawn to Nick Fury, and she was jokingly dubbed Nicola Fury.
• Genius Bonus: Did you know: the symbol Sparklelord has on his breastplate here (spoiler warning!) is a Star of Chaos, symbolizing its endless posibilities. You may know it better from Warhammer 40,000, which all but hijacked the mark for itself.
• Harsher in Hindsight: At the end of "Futures Trading", Doc tells the older Gordito and Sean that he looks forward to seeing them in twenty years (sort of); considering his fate in the ending, they won't recognize him at all even if he did meet them again.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: In one of the early arcs, Doc tries to solve a mystery by asking himself "What would Batman do". In "AWOL MD" we learn that he does things like that because he loved Batman comics growing up, and they inspired him to be the hero and nice guy he is today.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Kate Beaton's guest comic had McNinja not knowing what do to his potato garden. Flash forward two years to the Army of One storyline, where it turns out the clone in charge of learning agriculture didn't make it to the amalgamation.
  • For the author, this page, since it was written days before the US President announced the death of Osama Bin Laden, public enemy number one, and happened to be posted twelve hours afterward. For everyone else, it felt like it was Ripped from the Headlines (unless they had only just found out from the Alt Text).
  • Anyone remember Archibald, king of the hobos?
  • Chuck Goodrich thinks reading books is boring. Whether he's Mayor of Cumberland, or King Radical.
  • This page of the comic, where we learn that the McNinja's earlier security system involved having a Suck E. Cheese's animatronic bear unexpectedly jump out at people.
• Inferred Holocaust: When King Radical turns the buildings of Cumberland into a Giant Mecha, how many people do you think died or were seriously injured while their entire houses were floating through the air? Let alone while the mecha itself moves around.
  • Surprisingly averted when the Radbot gets deactivated. All the buildings just gently fall back into their proper places, which the Alt Text jokingly suggests is caused by the "advanced ghost network".
• Jerkass Woobie: King Radical. He just wants to make the world a cooler place, and when he talks to Dr. McLuchador/McNinja about Radical Land, you can almost feel the longing in the text. Almost had another example in a recent comic when Herschel explodes and looks terrified but is overjoyed by his replacement.
  • In "All The King's Dirtbikes And All The King's Men" we learn that Sparklelord became evil partially because the then-current King Radical (back then our King Radical was just Sir Sicknasty) and his allies destroyed his home and people just because they weren't cool enough. Ouch.
• Memetic Badass: Doc himself.
• Memetic Mutation: "Ninjas can't catch you if..." It started with Dan's proclamation that they can't catch you if you're on fire and branched out from there.
  • Eventually referenced in the comic itself.
• Moral Event Horizon: The End Part 2 has multiple candidates for King Radical. First, killing a giant lumberjack who is really a small child with toxic gas just to unsettle Dr. McNinja. Then, the sickeningly casual murder of Old McNinja...AND the Pterodactyl. The Pterodactyl was Radical's ALLY..
• Rewatch Bonus: Everything about King Radical, Chuck Goodrich, and Sparklelord after we learn their respective origins.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Dame Dudeical of Diamonds, in contrast to the other three Knights of the Radical Lands. She gets one small role in a flashback and one cameo during the story, and isn't mentioned again at any point.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Army of One ends on the intriguing note that Frans Rayner now knows what Doc looks like without his mask. This is only brought up as a very minor plot point in the last story arc, where Rayner can confirm that various characters aren't Doc.
  • Despite everything, King Radical ultimately has sympathetic motives. By the time of The End: Part 2 he has gone full villain and starts kicking dogs at every opportunity just to spite McNinja. It isn't hard to find his ultimate defeat a bit lacking as a result.
• Values Dissonance: Early in the comic, characters would casually throw around insults like gay or retarded. This was dropped around the switch to color.

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