Introduction
I want to be Stan Sakai
I first got to know Stan in early 1998, when I helped organize a forum in Tokyo for North American and Japanese cartoonists and comic book artists. I acted mainly as a coordinator and interpreter for the forum organizer, Tezuka Productions, but I also got to help select some of the artists from the States. It was easy to propose Stan as a candidate, since I had long admired his work.
The manga industry has become gargantuan and global, so much so that some people in the business in Japan have begun to look down their noses at North American cartoons and comics, or to consider them limited to superhero fare. In selecting artists for the forum, one of our goals was therefore to introduce people to the wide variety of work being done in North America. In retrospect, to many of the forum’s Japanese participants, Stan must have seemed original to the point of being mind-boggling. Born in Japan of a Japanese-American father and a Japanese mother, but raised in Hawaii and culturally very much an American, he draws American comics heavily influenced by Japanese samurai movies, set in feudal Japan, but populated with furry animal and occasional dinosaur characters. To merely call Stan’s Usagi Yojimbo “original” is a terrible understatement.
I was recently reflecting on what it is that I like so much about Usagi. I was watching Yoji Yamada’s 2005 film, The Hidden Blade, the follow-up to his immensely popular Twilight Samurai. It hearkens back to the golden era of samurai movies, à la director Akira Kurosawa and others, and was so good that it made me hunger for more. It also made me want to go back and read Usagi Yojimbo, too, for I realized that Usagi has the same wonderfully rich, detailed, immersive, and otherworldly quality that I love about early postwar samurai films. And of course Usagi’s also got another favorite of mine - furry animals! I know that Stan grew up watching samurai films in Hawaii, and also was probably glued to the box on Saturday morning watching the furry-animal TV cartoon masterpieces of his day. But until Stan came along, I doubt if anyone had ever thought of combining these two worlds, at least in such an entertaining, well researched, tongue-in -cheek, and only slightly (but deliberately) historically inaccurate way. If all these adjectival phrases sound as though they shouldn’t co-exist, well, in Usagi they get along like dear old friends.
One would think that someone with as much talent as Stan might be a difficult person, occasionally given to smashing hotel rooms and to checking into rehab, but he isn’t like that at all. I don’t know anyone so original, who seems to enjoy his work so much, and who is also so well-adjusted. And it shows in his work. To say that I admire Stan and his work is an understatement. I would love to be Stan Sakai.
FREDERIK L. SCHODT
Frederik L. Schodt is the author of Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1983) and Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga (Berkley: Stone Bridge Press, 1996). He has a website at www.jai2.com.
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Usagi's Twentieth Anniversary
Most of the stories collected in this volume were originally published in 2004 as single issue comic books. That year marked the twentieth anniversary of the first publication of Stan Sakai’s beloved samurai bunny, Usagi Yojimbo, who originally saw print in eight-page story in Albedo #2, a “funny animals” comic published by Thoughts and Images in November 1984.
In the history of comics, very few individual creators have matched Stan’s record for longevity on a single title, and twenty years of Usagi Yojimbo was definitely worth celebrating!
At Dark Horse, designer Cary Grazzini added a Twentieth Anniversary graphic to the cover of each issue published in 2004. Cary was also responsible, working directly with Stan, for The Art of Usagi Yojimbo, a lush hardcover that reproduced, in color and in black-and-white, twenty years’ worth of Usagi artwork, including some rare as well as brand-new pieces.
Comic-Con International: San Diego got in on the celebration by dedicating a section of their prestigious convention catalogue to drawings commemorating Usagi’s twenty years of existence. Stan himself did a one-page strip for the catalogue, and it is reprinted on the following page.
On the back cover of each issue of Usagi, we usually run an illustration chosen from a stack of copies of convention “sketches,” ink drawings done by Stan for various shows. The back cover of Usagi #80, the last issue of 2004, featured a drawing of Stan himself calmly eating while the rabbit ronin attacks from behind. I “forgot” to run the final, colored version of the drawing past Stan for his official approval, and unbeknownst to him, I had Cary add a Happy Anniversary greeting and then asked each member of the Dark Horse staff to sign his or her name around the art. The black-and-white version, complete with signatures, is reprinted here. This was Dark Horse’s surprise thank you to Stan for a memorable twenty years of Usagi - we all kept the secret, and Stan didn’t actually see the back cover until the comic was printed!
Congratulations to Stan for the first twenty years of Usagi Yojimbo - and here’s to the next twenty!
-Diana Schutz
April 2006
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“Usagi Yojimbo” and "Space Usagi", including all prominent characters
featured in the stories and the distinctive likenesses thereof are
trademarks of Stan Sakai and Usagi Studios. Usagi Yojimbo is a registered
trademark of Stan Sakai. Names, characters, places, and incidents featured
in this publication either are the product of the author’s imagination or are
used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events,
institutions, or locales, without satiric content, is coincidental.
