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The Return Of Ninja Boy, Via Kickstarter, With Alé Garza And Allen Warner For Wildstorm's 25th Anniversary…

Published Fri, 05 May 2017 11:00:44 -0500

The 25th anniversary of WildStorm Studios has seen all manner of projects come to light, including the Wildstorm Oral History. Which has a little section on Allen Warner and Alé Garza's Ninja Boy.

Allen Warner (Writer): I had known Alé Garza and was familiar with all his stuff. He had basically drawn this image for an idea he had called Ninja Boy. Just a really cool poster/cover image/print piece. He had all the main characters and a couple names and had some scenes and ideas, stuff like that. So, he had it on the table for a convention and a guy showed some interest in it and asked him if he would be interested in pitching it as a cartoon. Of course, he would [laughs].

So, it turned out that the guy worked at CBS in the animation department, but was about to leave that job and was essentially going to be an agent. He wanted to get a full pitch together for it as a cartoon. Alé basically got in touch with me, asked if I'd be interested in helping flesh out the full story and fully plot it out, build the backstory, the world, and all the supporting characters and everything. I helped him get all that stuff together. We met with the guy and had a long process of where we pitched it around to a few different companies.

We ended up having it optioned at Warner Bros Animation. So I did a full series bible for them and Alé did a bunch more art—character pieces, all that kind of stuff. When we were in the process of that, which was a long process as they tend to be, the whole time we wanted to do it as a comic. Warner Brothers at that time, they were under the same corporate umbrella as WildStorm, and he'd already worked for WildStorm, so it seemed like a perfect fit. We met with Jim Lee and kind of pitched it to him; let him know what we were doing with the cartoon angle of it, and we showed him what we had so far. He pretty much gave us the green light right away.

Alé Garza (Artist): Jim came in and made me an offer I couldn't refuse. He offered us to do Ninja Boy as a book if we came back and worked in the studio because he was really feeding off the different artists' energy at the time, and he wanted to be around a bunch of us creative types. Everything seemed to be going pretty well, and then 9/11 happened, and pretty much, WB scratched all the action-adventure for that season. We got the phone call the next day and basically, they were going with the new Scooby-Doo cartoon instead. That was a little bit of a kick in the nuts. Ninja Boy ended
up coming into fruition on its own as a comic book, which is still probably one of my proudest pieces of work. I know Allen still holds it close to his heart. I'm still asked to this day at conventions when it's going to come back. It's amazing to me because it's already been 14 years since it came out so it's nice that people still love the characters and hold on to it. I just tell them, "Well, we'll have to wait and see."

Well, you don't need to wait much longer.

Ninja Boy is back. The fan favorite series is making a comeback thanks to Alé Garza, Allen Warner and Overground Comics! All the big guns have come out to show love and support for the new series, Life after Death, Skottie Young, Mark Brooks, Kenneth Rocafort, Siya Oum, Andy Park, Kaare Andrews, David Nakiyama, Humberto Ramos, Joe Benitez, and Tyler Kirkham have all contributed variant cover for issue one alone.