Comic books. Until recently, the bane of parents, teachers and librarians everywhere. Joshua Elder, the Chicago-based author of the graphic novels Mail Order Ninja, volumes 1 and 2, doesn't know where he'd be without them.

"I'm one of those lifelong comic fans," he says. "I taught myself to read with comics."

And he isn't just boasting. His mother bought him his first comic book at age 2 (World's Finest, which follows the joint adventures of both Batman and Superman). When he was 4, his mother lost her voice in the middle of reading an issue of Transformers to him at bedtime.

"I was going crazy. I had to find out what happened to Optimus Prime [the book's hero]."

So, he picked up the book, sounded out the letters and finished the tale, teaching himself to read in the process.

At 10, a chance showing of the Japanese anime classic "Akira" proved to be life-altering. "My best friend's older brother had rented it and he basically sat me down and made me watch it," Elder says. "I grew up in a little Illinois town called Carmi near the Indiana border. To go from Disney animated movies to something like 'Akira' was mind-blowing."

Comic books and animated films suddenly offered strange and new possibilities.

"It ignited my interest in the form and technique," Elder says. "I wanted to know everything I could about manga and anime."

He pursued a degree in film at Northwestern, where he was also a managing editor and columnist for the campus newspaper. (Elder has also written free-lance book reviews for the Sun-Times.)

It was during that time that he first began to develop the idea that would eventual become Mail Order Ninja. ElElder was sitting around with a buddy trying to come up with ideas for a short student film.

"I was flipping through a comic book and looking at all the stuff they advertise, and I thought, what would be the craziest thing you could send away for? A ninja. That would be funny if you could mail-order a ninja."

After he realized the idea would be too cost-prohibitive for a student film, he filed it away while he took a summer internship in an attempt to break into the comic book industry.

Elder did internships in New York at both DC Comics and Wizard magazine (a monthly periodical that covers the comic book industry) hoping either might lead to his big break.

At Wizard, he wasn't writing comics, he was writing about comics.

Things really weren't any better at DC. He spent two summers at DC. In his first year, He wrote press releases and organized press clippings. He finally got to work on comic books his second summer, but only as and editorial intern.

"Io look up continuity questions like, 'Is this the first time Superman had met the Blue Beetle?' and things like that," he says. "It's pretty useless. Unless someone dies or majorly falls out of favor, it's hard to break into comics unless you're coming from another medium like television or film."

He submitted scripts, but to no avail.

"Unfortunately, I was told point blank that until you do something else, they really can't use you."

A bit dejected, he returned from New York and began working in an Evanston comic book shop.

"I didn't write anything for two years," he says. "Finally, I realized that if it was going to happen, I would have to do it on my own with stories that didn't rely on 60-year-old, copyrighted characters."

So Elder used his own money to hire an illustrator (Erich Owen) and submitted the completed work to Los Angeles-based Tokyopop's fifth "Rising Stars of Manga" contest. He won the grand prize in 2005.

The first book sets up the premise for the series: Timmy McAllister is a an average fifth-grader living in Cherry Creek, Ind. ("Voted most vanilla town fifth year in a row" reads a headline in the town's paper in one panel). Constantly bullied at school, he sends away for his own ninja after seeing an ad in a comic book.

"I laugh all the time when I'm writing it. It's really written for the 8-year-old inside of me."

The third book, tentatively set to be published in June, picks up with Timmy now a sort of celebrity thanks to the antics of his ninja. Timmy eventually begins to believe his own hype.

Though Elder's series is published by Tokyopop, the largest publisher of both English-translated manga and manga-styled graphic novels, Elder doesn't consider himself a manga writer.

"We borrow some of the visual motifs from manga, but I don't consider it American-style manga and I certainly don't think I'm an American writer of manga," he says. "My stories have more in common with 'Looney Tunes' than Japanese comic books."

Elder and his publisher are fielding offers to turn the franchise into either an animated series or a feature film.

Borrowing a page from Superman, Elder's comic book success has led to a syndicated Sunday comic strip seen in 50 newspapers throughout the country (none in Chicago). The success of the series has also meant that Elder has established a name for himself.

"I've sold a story to DC about Batman," Elder says. "It's a single issue in a book that's a testing ground for people like me who haven't necessarily proven themselves to DC just yet."

He's also in talks with Chicago Children's Theatre to turn his comic into a play. His focus, however, remains on his own comic book.

"Mail Order Ninja is my dream," he says. "And now that that dream is coming true, everything else is secondary."

Sun-Times features reporter Misha Davenport is a lifelong comic book fan, though he's never mail-ordered anything from one.