Sometimes I worry about professing my love for Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo, especially since a comic about a giant anthropomorphized rabbit samurai sounds like the sole property of a certain sub-culture that even I look down on. But I can't help it - Usagi Yojimbo is one of the best darn things I ever read.
- Usagi Yojimbo started back in the eighties, when black and white comics about giant animal warriors were kind of a thing, so it'd be easy to dismiss Usagi Yojimbo as a gimmicky cash-in. The thing is, the animal characters Stan Sakai uses to tell his samurai stories are some of the best, most well-crafted characters I've ever read. They could be illustrated as rabbits, humans, dogs, or giant talking toaster ovens and still feel very real.
- One of the biggest complaints I have about comics in general is the massive amount of backstory generally necessary to understand even the simplest of stories. Usagi Yojimbo largely avoids that by telling simple, done-in-one-issue stories that manage to be gripping and fresh, even though our main character rarely encounters anything new ("What? He's fighting bandits? That hasn't happened since at least last month!").
- Stan Sakai's work is incredibly well-researched. He sets his stories in feudal Japan, and he makes sure that the details of daily life are accurate. Sometimes, he'll straight up dive off for a couple of pages into some exposition about the history of the country or the way swords were made back then. And it's ALWAYS fascinating.
- Far and away, one of my favorite stories in the series involves our main character, Miyamoto Usagi, participating in a tea ceremony with an old friend. There's almost no dialog in the whole issue, but there's still a lot of emotional intensity AND a big educational discourse on how the tea ceremony works. Considering that the issue right before it (and likely the one right after it) involved a bunch of big stupid fights, the fact that Sakai can take something as simple as sitting down to tea and turn it into a compelling story is testament to his skill.
- Speaking of skill, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that Usagi Yojimbo is one of the best-looking comics out there, even without any coloration. Sakai's a master at the black-and-white medium, employing techniques like stippling and crosshatching to do far more than add visual variety to his panels. He communicates emotion with his linework in a way I've not seen in many other books.
- In the twenty-five or thirty years or so that Sakai's been working, he's introduced a TON of characters, and thus has been able to craft a variety of stories. For straight up brawls, he's got Gen the bounty hunter. Tomoe and her Lord Noryiuki lend themselves well to stories about political intrigue. Inspector Ishida (my favorite) solves murder mysteries as well as Holmes or Poirot. For stories with a more supernatural bend, you've got the immortal murderer Jei or Sakura the demon hunter. And Sakai's proven that he can do all these stories justice.
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