WRITER & ARTIST: STAN SAKAI | PUBLISHER: IDW | FORMAT: SINGLE ISSUE | RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
Usagi Yojimbo feels like a bit of an oddity in the world of modern comics. Maybe it did at the time as well. Still, there’s something about the mash-up of cutesy rabbit, meticulous hand-drawn artwork, and a panel by panel storytelling style that clearly comes from a world of three-panel newspaper funnies at least as much as from your Spidermen and Supermen. There’s also the earnest evoking of 16th-century Samurai culture as gleaned from the films of Kurosawa (hence Yojimbo) and the like (which may have been relatively obscure back then but now feel just as much a part of our culture as…well, Superman and Spiderman).
Created back in the mid-’80s by Stan Sakai (in the same era and milieu as Eastman and Laird’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) Usagi Yojimbo is a novel (for the time) re-casting of a variety of now all-too-familiar samurai and Japanese martial arts tropes, with an absurdly cute and cool looking rabbit as the hero (Usagi is literally the Japanese for rabbit) with a grumpy lion for a sensei, in a landscape where tiny cute dinosaurs are wildlife, narrating his life story to a rhinoceros and being confronted by evil ninja bats.
It sounds like the stuff of Saturday morning cartoons (and Usagi has made cameos in every TMNT cartoon series ever made), but this comic is far more heartfelt than that, doing its best not to condescend to its readers as it introduces us to ronin and bokken and senseis (all adorably footnoted to explain what they are, although by the 21st century most readers will have encountered them many times across many genres or even in real life).
In line with the earnestness, the artwork is surprisingly lush, particularly the backgrounds, with some panels demanding a good pause to linger over the details on trees and swaying grasses. Usagi Yojimbo is still going strong, but this issue definitely feels like it takes us back to an earlier time, an innocent age with less polish and prejudice involved in how to put a comic together, where a writer/artist could try out new ideas and see where they went. There may be many readers who don’t care for the cutesy/earnest/samurai/rabbit combo that resulted from Sakai’s ’80s experiment, but we’re not one of them. Long live Miyamoto Usagi!
