Usagi Yojimbo

For Christmas, I got a good chunk of Amazon gift certificates. Around the same time, Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo: The Special Edition came out. Coming in at 1200 pages, it collects the first seven volumes of the series (the most recent released being volume 24) plus some additional material at the end of the second book. To that point, I hadn't read any of the series, but had always heard good things about it. Other than a couple appearances in the 80s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon, I had little knowledge of Usagi other than that he is a samurai and a rabbit. (Usagi Yojimbo translates literally to "rabbit bodyguard.")

Usagi Yojimbo follows the story of Miyamoto Usagi, a masterless samurai, and his wanderings through Edo period Japan (so Wikipedia tells me) after his lord is killed in battle. He runs into all sorts of other characters, often inspired by (well, blatantly ripped off of is probably more accurate) Japanese film characters. There's several stories involving blind swordspig Zato-Ino, and he regularly works with a bounty hunter, Gen, modeled after an Akira Kurusawa character.

Usagi's world is filled with intelligent animals of all sorts of species, although some work better than others. Anthropomorphic snakes, for instance, do not work quite as well as some of the other animals he uses. At any rate, there's a pretty wide representation. Usagi is, of course, a rabbit. As mentioned above, Zato-Ino is a pig, Gen is a rhino, and Usagi clashes with some ninja clans comprised of cats, moles, and bats. Within the book this is treated as completely normal, and species is rarely mentioned except when it's relevant. Ninja that can fly (and have swords on their wings, even) is pretty important, while a bunch of cat burglars is not so much. Oddly enough, there are still animals that don't seem to have the level of intelligence of others. Sakai seems to love drawing tokage lizards into his panels - probably because they look like little dinosaurs and comic artists seem to love finding excuses to draw dinosaurs - and one briefly becomes an important character.

At any rate, I thoroughly loved the books. Sakai's stories are not very complex, often being having somewhat similar plots, but they're very well-told. His art is, simply, gorgeous. His characters are expressive, his sense of composition gets better and better throughout those 1200 pages, and the storytelling is clear and attractive. He never fails to fill a panel, but rarely enough to actually distract from the action. He's just as good at telling a long-form story over a few issues as he is at a done-in-one tale, and they never feel hurried or drawn out. I can see why it's lasted as long as it has.