Hey, dudes! Remember the '80s? Remember leg warmers and The Cosby Show? Remember Ronald Reagan and zippered red leather jackets? Remember women's business suits with floppy bows at the neck and white sneakers at the feet? And how about that wacky Cold War with the USSR?

Well, I got a nice healthy dose of the same when I was recently gifted a copy of NINJA #1, a comic which, at first glance, looks like it might actually be about an honest-to-gyoza Japanese ninja lady. I suppose I should have known by her brown outfit on the cover, and that fact that her name was "Kate", that she wasn't quite the ninja we comics readers were fed in such abundance back in the day. Maybe she was some kind of Desert Ninja, or maybe she just took that whole "brown is the new black" movement a bit too seriously.

At any rate, when I sat down with this gem, I was giddy with anticipation, thinking how easy it would be to find all the flaws in this book and exploit them for my own evil, if terribly amusing, purposes. Here is what I found:

• The art is exactly what you might expect from a comic published in the midst of the ‘80s glut. That is, it's black and white and unremarkable all over. Profiles look especially bizarre.

• Nothing much happens in the story but set up. An explosion out of context here, Kate as a child (who evidently was a C cup in middle school) getting valuable swordplay training there, and a lot of flashbacks, but not much else.

• There is an odd text segment at the end fleshing out the back story. What a cool device! I wonder if Alan Moore ever thought of doing something just the same in WATCHMEN? Oh, that's right. He did.

But that's all! One reeeaally bad logo notwithstanding, it wasn't half bad. I actually found myself wishing I had laid my hands on the next issue. The story was pretty interesting: young girl is trained to fight by her stern Dad (probably military) and her Sensei/grandfather "so she won't be a victim." Like ya do. Girl becomes a woman and joins the US Army as a special forces type gal, learning to kill with a gun, kill with a knife, kill with a #10 envelope, kill with a log of Velveeta, blah blah blah.

There is some hinting at a romantic entanglement with fellow soldier, a conspiracy involving a traitorous Major, Ruskie spies and a fateful decision to go rogue and rescue a friend from the Reds. There's even a Jimmy Carter joke! Wowee! All in all, a fun trip down Tom Clancy's Memory Lane.

Fun. That did not bode well for my scheme to flay this comic up one cheaply printed side and down the other. What's a saucy gay humorous comics review-writer to do?

Then... it came to me. Maybe it was Heklina on stage at SF Pride this year, or maybe it was getting set to see Peaches Christ's screening of Showgirls on my birthday next month, but I started thinking about a live-action re-make of NINJA... with Kate played by a fierce drag queen!

As far as I'm concerned, it's a genius move. You wouldn't need to change a single word of the script! Just cast, say RuPaul as Kate, make sure her costumes are over the top with sequins, throw in some killer CGI fight sequences, add several buff fellow Army dudes, and voila! Change no plot...just crank up the volume. Have no one notice that Kate (code-named "Ninja") wears a star-spangled, satin-lined, high-heeled ninja suit complete with five-foot afro.

It could be coming to a gay network or cable access channel near you... if not for one thing: those stinkers at Eternity Comics apparently trademarked the word "Ninja!" They've probably made so much money from royalties off of that one word that they'd never consent to having it sullied by association with this project.

Sorry, Lypsinka, but we'll have to put off the auditions until we can work something out with Eternity's lawyers. Until then, we'll all just have to settle for scouring the quarter bins and yard sales for copies of Ninja #1... or even #2. Happy hunting, campers!

Kyle Minor, now the chief masked defender of the 600 block of Valencia Street in San Francisco's Mission District, was trained by his parents in his West Virginia backyard to be a lethal fighter by forcing him to mow the lawn and stack endless piles of firewood. Take that, crime!

All images and characters TM and © 2005 of Eternity Comics. Review © 2005 Kyle Minor.

Prism Comics promotes the works of the LGBT community in comics. It does not implicitly endorse any other material or products associated with those works. Any opinions expressed are those of the author(s).