Vagabond

I’ve been trying to catch up on my comics reading lately, and while I haven’t really put too much of a dent in the huge stack of trade paperbacks on my dresser, I’ve made some progress. The stack is good anyway, as it keeps the cats from jumping atop my new dresser and scratching the wood, as they are wont to do.

So far I’ve been through the new Fables and Jack of Fables trades, the Walking Dead, Invincible, three Samurai Assassin collections, Astonishing X-Men, the first Savage Sword of Conan (what a beast of a phone book that was), and about three other Conan trades. Probably some other shit, too. Those are just the books I haven’t put away yet.

But what I really want to talk about is Vagabond by Takehiko Inoue (or Inoue Takehiko, depending on which side of the Pacific you’re on). I just read the last two collections (#’s 26 & 27) back to back, and they are fantastic.

I’m not a huge manga fan. That is, I read a fair number of manga books, but they are selected with great care, and must have two things I find frequently lacking in the flood of manga books that have overloaded the shelves of American bookstores: cohesive, compelling writing and detailed, semi-realistic art. Most manga is too disjointed and cartoonish for my taste, kind of like reading an epileptic seizure. I also demand a fair bit of action. I have no patience for comics about teenage love angst, though that covers a good 60% of manga. The young Japanese girls apparently eat that shit up.

I was first drawn to the genre, like many before me, by the amazing work of Kazuo Kioke and Goseki Kojima on Lone Wolf & Cub, which is still probably the greatest manga series ever. From there I followed writer Kazuo Koike to a number of his other works, which led me to his other partner, the amazing artist Ryoichi Ikegami, with whom he collaborated on the awesome Crying Freeman. It was while I was going through all Ikegami’s books that I came across Vagabond on the shelves and bought it on a whim.

Vagabond is a retelling of the life story of the Japanese Sword-Saint, Miyamoto Musashi, as based on the world-famous novel about Musashi’s life written by Eiji Yoshikawa. This is the same novel Hiroshi Inagaki based his acclaimed Samurai series of movies on, starring Toshiro Mifune.

But unlike the movies, Vagabond doesn’t bore the crap out of me. It details the quest of Musashi to become invincible under the sun. The series starts with his childhood, always a favorite tactic of mine, and details Musashi’s path from a rural peasant in feudal Japan to the greatest samurai in history.

Inoue’s art shifts seamlessly from beautiful watercolors to incredibly intricate pen and ink renderings. The book can read quickly, and you have to purposely slow down to take in his breathtaking landscapes and scenery. Sometimes I think he spends hours doing the delicate shading lines of a tree in the background that you barely notice because of the action of the figures in the foreground. You don’t see that level of perfection very often in American comics, and its always refreshing.

Likewise, the story can leap with alacrity from scenes of incredible violence and bloodshed to tranquil ponderings of philosophy and meditation. Thus, Inoue shows the dichotomy of the legendary Musashi, whose factual history is filled with years of nonstop killing (I think he won something like 67 duels, all of which were to the death), and the peace and thoughtfulness of Musashi’s writing and watercolor art in his treatise on swordsmanship and life, the Book of Five Rings.

There are also amazing treatments, not only of Musashi’s most famous duels, but of the lives and characters of those famous opponents, like Sasaki Kojiro, Shishido Baiken, and the Yoshioka brothers. Thus, Inoue shows unique, fully realized characters, going through their lives with success after success and bright futures, cut down in their primes by the unstoppable killing machine of Mushashi because of the unforgiving, prideful dueling that was the norm of samurai life during that period of Japan.

My only complaint about Vagabond is that sometimes it can take a loooong time between installments. There was one period of a couple of years when I thought Inoue must have died or retired with the series unfinished. Turns out he was doing some book about crapass basketball, which was apparently immensely popular.

Feh.

Posted on July 15, 2008 at 10:07 pm by PeatB
Filed under Musings
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