Years ago, a friend of mine threw a historical novel down in dusgust because it included the phrase "Get a load of this, Caesar." It's a fine line when translating colloquial language in not making it too stodgy or too slangy. I decided to have fun with it.
It is a fine line. My problem is that when I was a kid, fun was Not Allowed in these matters. Instead, I picked up a taste for other cultures of a kind which gets called racist these days. But I've so far got over it as to genuinely enjoy this comic. :)
Well, rightly or wrongly, my assumption going into this was that Japanese media is by now so ubiquitous in our culture that I could have the same sort of absurdist fun with this that I would in a story about cowboys or knights or whatever. When I did the Timbuktu story years later, I made more of an effort to show some actual research and be a bit less goofy because I assumed it was a time and place with which most of my readers would be unfamiliar.
Over the years, I've actually been more concerned about the Rogue Canadian Scientists possibly offending someone, since IMO they are an even broader stereotype than the ninjas (who are really more a joke about anime and martial arts films than about Japan itself), and they are, of course, villains. I created them as a reference to the X-Men's strange conceit that Canada is full of crazed scientists who all want to experiment on Wolverine. I've tried to at least keep them likeable.
I'm pretty sure I got all the Ninja jokes, or most of them anyway... who on Earth are Larry Moe and Curly Joe, and why are they suddenly cropping up in all these different webcomics? XD But it's not a whole lot of comics, just this and Freefall. I might have seen them on TV when I was a kid, but probably not. A lot of those old shows ring a bell if I've seen them, but maybe that one didn't make it across the Atlantic or something. But anyway, you're right, ninjas are more a movie thing, and I'm sure the anime tropes you also play off were never meant to be taken too seriously. It's probably one of those times I need to lighten up.
I thought you handled the Timbuktu story very well. The jokes came across as an entertaining inversion of scholar tropes and playing up a funny side of human nature, not the culture.
I must confess the Rogue Canadian Scientists give me "What on Earth?" face. XD I've hardly had time for TV or movies in the last 20 years, so I've entirely missed the development of the relevant tropes. Then again, Jules Verne's "Whoever calls himself Canadian, calls himself a Frenchman" also gave me "What on Earth?" face, so maybe it's just Canada. >XD
Oh my goodness! Larry, Moe, and Curly (later it was Larry, Moe, and Shemp; and still later, Larry, Moe, and Curly Joe) are the Three Stooges. They were a comedy trio back in black and white movie days, and they pretty much defined slapstick comedy in American movies. Their stuff is... extremely silly, but absolutely worth checking out if you've never seen it.
Thank you for the compliments on the Timbuktu story! I tried really hard to make that bit come out well. Though if I'm being perfectly honest, I may as well confess that I got the idea of an African villager picking up a quest from a dying traveler from Alan Dean Foster's novel "Carnivores of Light and Darkness" -- although my approach is different enough from his that I don't feel too guilty about it.
