A little backstory…Back in 2011 or thereabouts, Ape Entertainment had acquired the license to produce Fruit Ninja comics from Halfbrick Studios, the folks that made the game. You probably remember back at the dawn of the Smart Phone that this little game was huge. Ape had other licenses, like the game Pocket God and Cut the Rope, and also stuff like Richie Rich, Strawberry Shortcake, and the Dreamworks properties. A lot of licensed IP is a combination of making sure that the characters are accurately depicted, and writing stories that are more or less in the same vein as the movies and television shows, but don’t change anything meaningful.

Fruit Ninja was a horse of a different color. They didn’t have any of that. They had some ideas, many of which had that late 80s Saturday morning cartoon vibe to them–you know, the villain takes over the realm and one hero team goes on a quest to stop their nefarious plans. I didn’t get a lot of it, because the other caveat was this: since the Fruit Ninja people were also swinging for a Saturday morning cartoon, they weren’t so keen on the comic books writing or introducing things that wouldn’t be in the cartoon. Understandable. What it meant was, we could do a Fruit Ninja comic, so long as it had nothing to do with the story they were writing.

When my friend Brent called me, they had a kind of a work-around, but they were stymied on where to go with it. If the Fruit Ninja cartoon plot was revolving around the kingdom of Fruitasia falling under the control of a despot, yadda yadda yadda, the Fruit Ninja comic would take place in between those beats. Therefore, the Saturday Morning Fruit Ninja kids and the aged sensei master (from inside the game) would occasionally interact with the crafty peddler and his pet pig (again, from the game) who would tell them stories of Emperor Daikon and the adventures he was having in Mangonesia on his sacred quest to find the Thing That Rhymes With Orange, and it would defeat the evil doers and restore balance and all of that kind of thing. The comic, then, would consist of the maybe true, maybe not stories Gutsu the peddler would tell the students, which may or may not be balderdash.

With that extra layer of I.P. plot protection in place, Brent and the Apesters were not sure which way to take the comic, so he asked me to take a look at it, and would I maybe like to help develop and write the main stories in the series? Well, it’s always nice to be asked, of course, but I wasn’t sure I could do anything with Fruit Ninjas. I mean, come on! I’m a serious artist! I’ve been nominated for a World Fantasy Award! I write dark, complicated, scary, mature things…for grown-ups! Fruit Ninja?! Please…I mean, the only way that would work is if you made the series tonally different from the cartoon, like maybe adding a sword and sorcery element, or…

A day after they sent me what they had, I said “Yes, I think I can swing this.” Writers. Pfft. You can’t do a thing with us.

I don’t remember what pieces and parts I added to the mix other than the idea that all of the character names would come from Japanese foods, fruits, vegetables, and of course, sushi. I don’t even remember if that was in place. What I did do was create a second full cast, consisting of Emperor Daikon, all full of unearned confidence and the baked in assurance that everything he chooses to do will work out just fine, because he’s the emperor, see? He’s accompanied by his trusted bodyguard and counsel, Sudachi, who has in turn brought three of his students with him: Kabu, Kiso, and Shiso, all siblings, with Shiso being the youngest and the only girl. They are accompanied by Chancelor Kyuri, their guide and translator in the kingdom of Mangonesia.

The thing that Ape wanted to do that I thought was brilliant was take standard-sized comic pages and cut them in half. They would fit on a phone or tablet screen when turned horizontally, which would be much easier to read, because they were trying to get these put in through the actual Fruit Ninja app, downloadable for a buck or so. After the stories premiered digitally, the pages could be reassembled and produced as a regular comic or a trade paperback. Genius, right? Unfortunately, the idea didn’t stick, but the format is still charming to me.

I loved writing these comics. I wrote nine scripts before the bottom fell out. I still don’t know quite what happened. But many of my stories were fully produced, with letters and colors and even covers for the first few issues. Shout out to the production team for making some great-looking comics; Marcello Ferreira in particular was a delight to work with and I would love to work with him again, assuming I can ever pay his page rate.

I thought you might like to see the first iteration of Fruit Ninja comics that almost came to pass (IDW eventually did a mini-series, several years past the app’s cultural flash point). If you want to know how the story shakes out, let me know and I’ll see if I can’t post the story for issue #2 next.