Super Ninja Dan - Vol. 9 Ch. 47 - Finale

[MangaDex]

 

[ReedemUp]

Thank you so very much for your efforts, it is deeply appreciated.

 

[TheBlarfe2000]

damn. super ninja dan is over. and that's why they cameod as pizza guys in blazing ninjaman.

 

[shrike]

What a weird series. It feels like the author purposely made the characters not compelling?

Thanks for working on this.

 

[SystematicChaos]

What a weird series. It feels like the author purposely made the characters not compelling?

Thanks for working on this.

I've posted this before on Batoto back before Mangadex launched when we were stuck on volume 1, but Super Ninja Dan has been referred to by its creators as their "dark history." For artist Kazuhiko Shimamoto, it was his first serial manga and he was just discovering his style and his sense of humor. For author Tetsu Kariya, it was a bit of a transition between the hard-boiled drama series he mainly wrote in the 70s and Oishinbo, one of the longest-running cooking manga of all time. You can tell there was a lot of tension between their visions; the dark and serious geopolitical thriller undertones and melodrama came from Kariya, while the goofy absurdist comedy came from Shimamoto, and these two did not blend very well tonally. Shimamoto would start on Blazing Transfer Student, his first solo series, while this manga was running, and while it's still a bit rough around the edges, you can see more of his voice come through and it overall feels more tonally consistent and compelling. Meanwhile, Kariya's Oishinbo, which he also started while this manga was running, has a much more light-hearted tone than his early dramatic works, largely from the influence of working with a gag artist like Shimamoto (prior to this he was strongly against illustrators adding in things that weren't in his scripts, but Shimamoto's gags made him laugh so he allowed it and even wrote his own gags as the series went on). Both of these creators went many years without acknowledging this series, though much later Shimamoto has written a fictionalized account of his collaboration with Kariya in his pseudo-autobiographical manga Blue Blazes.
So I think you're on to something that this series is weird, and I think that weirdness makes it an interesting piece in these creators' history, because it definitely comes from a mismatch in the creative team with an author and illustrator that had conflicting visions and styles trying to work together, both changing and growing in the process. It's certainly not either of their best, but it's worth a read for that alone.