How did it begin for you?

[Inukai79]

Just out of curiousity, how were first introduced to Usagi, and what was your first impression.

Was is a single issue? A trade? A character? A story?

Share how you were first introduced to the rabbit ronin.

For me, a local comic shop owner introduced me to Usagi after hearing plug it constantly on his public access tv show. He suggested I start with Book 3, as it was one of the easiest to start with. How could I not like it, with the great story " The Tower" which introduce Spot. Or howabout the heartwrenching "A Mother's Love". And lets not forget Usagi squaring off against Zato Ino, The Blind Swordspig; and Usagi first run in with demonic Jei. All of this combined to prove to me what a rich tapestry Stan Sakai was weaving. And proof that this was no silly wabbit.

[cynlee]

For me it was the I believe 1987 San Diego Comic-Con-- I went that year because one of my favorite authors was supposed to be there, but he had to cancel at the last minute due to a family emergency-- I was cruising around, looking at the stuff, and got attracted to a group of tables and artists that were doing comics that weren't DC/Marvel-- mainly the first was Sergio Aragones' Groo the Wanderer-- and then I met Larry Marder (Tales of the Beanworld), Joshua Quagmire (Cutey Bunny) and Stan Sakai (Usagi Yojimbo).

I started talking with them, and they were all interesting and funny and stuff like that-- by the second year I went to Comic-con I was hooked. Stan even came to my school one year here in L.A. and did a lesson with my second graders at the time-- it was great.

[MikeM]

I dont recall the first time I first heard about Usagi Yojimbo, but the first issue I ever read was issue 39 of the Dark Horse series. It was a prologue to Grasscutter II. I was hooked.

I looked around the local comic shop and asked if they had any more Usagi comics. Unfortunately they didnt, but the owner, who knows me very well, said he might have something in the basement. After a couple of minutes he came up with volume 3 of the trades.

I picked up several trades since then, but didnt want to read them until I got the earlier ones. I finally got Volume 4 a few weeks ago and Volume 6 about a month ago. I am missing volume 18 and 19 now. 19 should be coming in soon, and Im told that 18 is back ordered.

So I finally started reading the trades, and Im half way through volume 3 again. I would love to get my volume 3 signed by Stan if I ever meet him.

MikeM

[Steve Hubbell]

Just out of curiousity, how were first introduced to Usagi, and what was your first impression.

Was is a single issue? A trade? A character? A story?

Share how you were first introduced to the rabbit ronin.

I discovered Sergio Aragones' Groo series back in the mid-eighties, and got hooked. (Speaking of which, Back Issue Magazine #11, just released this week, has a great interview with Sergio Aragones and Mark Evanier)

The fact that Usagi Yojimbo was frequently mentioned in Groo, and the fact that Stan worked on Groo, and the aditional fact that I loved the color work done by Tom Luth on the covers of the Usagi Yojimbo and Critters issues proved to be too much temptation to resist.

By the early nineties, I had all the issues of Groo and was starting to look into other comic work that Sergio had done, and that led me to his Catnippon material. Even though it was not the first story I read, The Tea Cup was the first Usagi story I searched out and bought specificly, because of the Catnippon back-up story. Because it was such a tribute or homage to Groo, I really enjoyed it. It is still one of my favorite Usagi stories.

The other early Gen stories, Bounty Hunter and Bounty Hunter II are what pulled me in, I think. I have always enjoyed the relationship between Usagi and his "best friend" Gen. It always brings out the humor in Stan's character.

The opposite extreme - in Homecoming, Samurai, and Circles, which depicted the relationship between Usagi, Mariko, and Kenichi - was just as influential, demenstrating Stan's ability to attribute very human emotions to his "funny animal" characters to such a degree that the reader could share those emotions.

First impression? The fact that, originally, I preferred the Nilson Groundthumper and Hermy stories because they were more like what I had been reading previously (Groo). It did not take very many Usagi stories to have my opinion change, and my interest in Samurai fiction and films to develop.

Abayo...

P.S.
There is a trivia contest posted on the Myspace Usagi site for anyone interested in trying to win a copy of the limited edition Trilog Tour II comic autographed by all six members of the tour, including Stan Sakai, Jeff Smith, Mark Crilley, etc...

http://groups.myspace.com/index.cfm?fus ... =100632965

Anyone who thinks they might know the correct answers can send a personal message to me at the Dojo here or through Myspace...

The dead-line is the end of July and is almost up...

Abayo!

[aro-tron]

Hey!
my first issue of Usagi was also the Prolouge issue to Grasscutter II! I was looking to start reading some new books, as Bone was pretty much the only thing I bought reguarly, even though it hardly ever came out on time.
My comics store had copies of the first few Grasscutter II issues, and I thought it looked like a perfect jumping-on point. I don't remember what other comics I decided to try at the time, Groo may have been among them, but Usagi was the only one that I bought another issue of. I can't believe how fast I was hooked!
Just a few weeks later I went ahead and bought the Space Usagi trade that had been sitting around the shop for years it seemed. It's still one of my favorite books.
I've never known anyone to read some Usagi and not want more of it.

[ziritrion]

I discovered Usagi at a comic con. I was walking around checking out everything and nothing in particular, and then I saw the cover of the 3rd book ("Way of the Wanderer", the Spanish edition features Usagi facing Jei). I liked the cover and took a look at the book. At first the art struck me as odd, but I felt like reading it. I had to put it down because at that very moment some friend called me and I had to go without buying it, but 2 days later I went to my comic book store and asked for it. I decided to buy book 8 "Shades of Death", went home and read it. The next day I went back to the comic book store and bought all the available trades, which I read in just 2 days, and reread about 516843549849438 (one more, one less) times per month (at least), until I grew tired of waiting because the Spanish trades were being released very slowly. So I sold all the trades I had (1 to 3 and 8 to 12) to a friend (whom I converted into a UY fan) and bought them again in English through the internet, until I discovered a comic-RPG-scifi store specialized in imports which was selling all the trades plus the individual issues. That was almost 3 years ago. And that's all, folks .

I was planning to go to the 2004 San Diego Comic Con but due to certain issues I finally couldn't, but I was finally able to meet Stan in Madrid last november, in which he made me a very happy fan by signing 2 books for me and making a quick Godzilla sketch for a friend (the same one to whom I sold my Spanish trades, who also wanted to come but finally couldn't), as well as signing a few sketchbooks for Dojoboard members.

Maybe I'll get to go to the San Diego Comic Con for the UY 25th anniversary. That would rock .

[starseed]

My discovery story is short & sweet, I recently posted this in another thread, but this thread seems appropriate as well:

For years I had heard bits & pieces of positive reviews for Usagi Yojimbo. Rumblings from website reviews to word of mouth to what people were buying at the comic book shops. I knew I always wanted to give it a try, but never did...

Of course, my younger brother had the Usagi TMNT figure and I vaguely remember him in the old cartoon.

However, I really discovered Usagi last summer (July 2004) while on vacation in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. I was looking for something to read on the plane trip home as its a looong one and so I finally picked up TPB books 5 & 6.

Once I got back home I immediately began ordering in all the other trades and snatching them up where ever I could. I'm a total addict now.

Right now I have books 1-18, I'm getting book 19 tommorrow. I have Color Specials 2&3, as well as The Art of Usagi (HC) that came out last December. I also have single issues #79-85. My goal now is to start buying some of the older single back issues.

Oh I also have the 8' PVC Usagi figure that was out a few years ago and all the TMNT dvd's that Usagi is featured in.

So you might say I'm a new loyal fan to Stan's creation: Usagi Yojimbo!

[Todd Shogun]

I started reading a year before Cynlee (in '86 just after the Summer Special was released and sold out completely), but the 1987 SDCC was my first-ever San Diego Con trip. I was 13 years old... I remember going mainly for Usagi and the TMNT... I finally found the UY Summer Special... I ended up buying four copies at the Con...lol

Here's a cut and paste from http://usagiyojimbo.com/intro/uydhistory.html

It was 1986 (possibly in the summer) when Todd-Shogun (then nothing more than an insignificant boll weevil) first picked up an issue of Critters with Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo in it. Young 12-year-old Todd-Weevil, a "Black-and-White Boom" baby, was picking up every black-and-white funny animal/mutant ninja anthropomorphic comic book he could get his grubby little fan-boy hands on... Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was his personal fave, followed closely by Critters, Albedo, Cutey Bunny, Cerebus, Equine the Uncivilized, Captain Jack, Fish Police, Black-belt Hamsters, Commando Koalas, Boris the Bear, Menagerie, Spaced, Panda Khan, Bean World, you name it (he also liked Groo, Robotech, GI Joe, X-Men, Batman, etc but those don't count cuz they weren't part of the B&W Boom). Back then Usagi to him was yet another cool warrior animal character....

1987
It wasn't until the next year when Todd-Weevil began becoming more and more crazy about Usagi. TMNT was still #1, but Usagi came up a close 2nd place. He hunted down all the back issues of Critters and Albedo (sans #2) and even got to go to the 1987 San Diego Con and acquire 4 copies of Summer Special #1 (which was published in 1986 but escaped his grubby little hands because of even MORE greedier fan-boys). He even got to see Stan, albeit as another anonymous fanboy.

1988
With the sell-out of the TMNT, and the fizzling out of the B&W Explosion, Todd's taste in comics changed. He was no longer the grubby little fanboy, but a more sophisticated comic book enthusiast. Usagi was #1 on his list, and his brain almost exploded when he got his first letter printed in uy-vol1-nr8#letters-column. Stan also mailed him a free signed copy of #8 along with a free fully-drawn-and-inked Usagi drawing (the one to the left)! He started getting more and more into Feudal Japan, drawing, and martial arts weapons. He never really got too caught up with the Manga craze, but he did like Anime... when he could find it.

1989
Todd started sending more and more letters in to the UY Letter Column, and even got his own fan art published in uy-vol1-nr18 (a trend which would strangely follow in every issue of UY with a #8 in it for several more years... #28, #38, and Vol. 2 #8 had fan art by Todd). He also acquired a copy of Albedo #2 at the 1989 SDCC for a whopping $100! He also got his very first commissioned piece of Usagi art from Stan... a cool drawing of Usagi and Shingen in team-up mode! RYAAAAAAAA!!!

1990 - 1995
Todd continued to read UY religiously and became known as the "Ace Letterhack" of UY fandom, with well over 20 letters printed in the two volumes of UY that were published. UY had switched publishers twice during this period of time.

January, 1996
Todd started attending college at Long Beach State University, and in doing so received a student Internet account... The thing is, Todd didn't know a whole lot about the Internet, so he had some computer-savvy friends hook him up. He had a PC at home, but he had never used the modem until now...

February, 1996
Todd learned quickly about the Web, Email, FTP, and HTML, enough to create his very own website, with the help of one of his instructors. He had browsed around the Dark Horse website, saw a few Usagi sites (Bill Burge's, Todd Jenner's, Jared Smith's, and of course the UY RPG site by Mark Arsenault), and decided to create his own personal webpage about Usagi, called the "Usagi Yojimbo Dojo". It was very simple, and he had to steal graphics from the other sites until he could learn to make them up on his own using a program. There was no true "official" Usagi website, and Todd had no initial intention of creating one... this was just a small link from his personal website.

March, 1996
Soon the site began to grow, and Todd started submitting it to search engines like Infoseek, Webcrawler, Excite, Lycos, and Yahoo. They indexed his site and he soon began receiving email about it, even from people who knew him from the old UY letter column days (UY afficionado Dan Benjamin was one of the first to contact him). It was cool. He started scanning his own images and creating graphics with a pirated copy of Corel Draw 5.0 for Windows 3.1 he got off a friend (don't tell anyone!). He added extra sites like the Tomoe Ame Website, the Dragon Bellow Conspiracy site, and later on the "cover gallery", Dojo News, and Space Station Usagi and Nilson & Hermy sites. He started getting more and more creative and soon a vision of this big UY site began to emerge in his mind. The other UY sites out on the net were pretty small, little more than personal webpages, with the exception of the UY RPG site, which had a pretty good amount of info on the then upcoming game.

April, 1996
One day in programming class he started messing around with Perl, a CGI language used in web pages to operate programs like guestbooks and discussion boards. He decided to add a guestbook to his page, but instead of a traditional guestbook, he decided to have it as a type of fan club sign-up form. And so the Unofficial UY Internet Fan Club was born. Additionally, he added a web-counter to track the amount of hits he was getting. That same counter graces the UY.com homepage to this very day, and has never been reset! [Actually it's not there anymore...wonder if it's still active somewhere in cyberspace limbo]

Many web-surfer Usagi fans began posting to the guestbook (UYD Members like Jared Smith, Josh Ford, Ronald Edge, J.R. Brown, David Royer, Ben Kelly, Simon Knowles, Kenneth Chisholm, Denis Hackney, Jason Sawtelle, Jon VanDuzee, Don "DUSTY" Rhoades, Tim "Crog" Ingram, Rosemary Reeve, Matthew "Fellstar" Morgan, Jamie Rich from DHC, Bill Burge, Amy "Amara" Pronovost, Stephen Escobedo, Evan "Gyumaoh" Jacobson, Adriel Lee Serna, Clint Moulds, Tom Bolling, Simon Magid, and Glenn "not Yoriki" Masuda). Some even began expressing an interest in helping out with it. Thus Todd came up with the idea of a simple two-way structured ranking system in the UY Dojo, with all helpers as "Hatamoto" or Retainers (this included himself -- Todd didn't set his eyes on the Shogunate until later on that year). Regular members would be known as "Shugyosha" (student warriors). Before this, everyone was known simply as "Usagi-Otakus". The first Retainer was Ben Kelly from Australia (creator of the ill-fated UY Online RPG). Others followed, like Jonathan "Kitsune" Roth, Simon Knowles, Tim "Crog" Ingram, David Royer, and Matt "Fellstar" Morgan.

May, 1996
In late spring, Jamie Rich (then editor of UY) informed Todd that the UYD address (the URL back then was http://heart.engr.csulb.edu/~tbustill/usagi.html) would appear in DHC UY #5. Todd was stoaked. Imagine the traffic that would come through once everyone in UY fandom knew the site was there. And increase it did.

In the early summer of 1996, something really cool happened: Stan Sakai expressed an interest in contributing to the site! It was Todd's wildest dream come true (right next to landing a date with Laetitia Casta... alas, still just a dream...). Stan offered to contribute story plots and cover art for future issues (via snail mail), well in advance of what the Dark Horse web site had to offer. He also offered up advanced and sometimes exclusive info on signings, merchandise, and upcoming specials. Todd graciously accepted the offer and soon there was a UY New Releases section with previews, synopses, and cover art!!! Also in June, the Dojo was indexed by Yahoo... something that rarely happend these days! Also in June, Tim "Crog" Ingram created the very first UY Animation, we found emulated copies of the UY C-64 video game and created the UY Video Game site

To read the rest, check out the above link!!!

[Captain EO]

I knew who he was since back in the day with the Turtles, but never read any of the comics. Last year at comic-con, I noticed it was the 20th Aniversary, and I found a Demon Mask tpb half off, so I picked it up to check it out. I was hooked.

[Becky-Chan]

Mt first experance with Usagi was seeing him in the old TMNT cartoon when I was in HS, but I never knew he had his own comics *boggles* Years later when I was in college, I became an active comic collector, and I spotted the TPB of Book 2 in my shop. Snagged it up seeing it was the same character from the cartoons.

And I've been hooked ever since.

Becky-Chan

[Ma-Ku]

My story is boring compaired to the others
I've seen the odd issue around and around Fall last year I decided to buy one - the earliest book the store had was book 6 (Circles) and that was the main book that started me off, been hooked ever since , and I bought the rest in a random order, heh.

Only books I need are 1, 4, 13 and 19 (which comes out in England August 1st

[Mayhem]

I'd been a TMNT fan from the mid80s, even though it was quite hard to get a hold of the comics here in the UK. There was a comic shop dealing in the unusual just up the road from school and that was able to supply me with some of the issues.

So the b&w status of the comic was never an issue and why I've never had a problem with Usagi being monotone. I first ran across the rabbit ronin via the computer game on the C64. Though despite reading a few of the comic at the time as well (a kid in my year had a penchant for the wacky and offbeat type of US comic and would often bring them in for others to read) for some reason I never actually got around to actively collecting the issues until about three years ago.

Getting them all proved a little tricky but thankfully most of them were not that hard to acquire. So here I sit three years later with every regular Usagi issue in first edition print all nicely bagged up and preserved (and all the Space Usagi ones as well). Not that I don't break them out from time to time to have another read through.

Next step I guess would be to acquire the Albedo and Critters issues... but I've got the trade books to cover me on most of that for the time being

[estee]

I can't remember really when I became aware of Usagi. It was way back in the Fantagraphic days, when Usagi went home to stay and fough Jei that I jumped on board.

Then I drifted for a while. Bought some here and there. Grasscutter was fun. Drifted some more. Then Grasscutter 2 came. Still I drifted. Now I'm back.

Guess I'm a wandering Usagi fan.

[Maka]

Great question Inukai79,

For me it was in the late 90's while my parents still lived in Oahu. I went to visit them during the summer and my mother and I went to the public library. There were 5 UY graphic novels there so I check them out using my mother's library card. Since this was pre-kids and it was Hawaii, I had plenty of time to just read through them.

The story that struck me was the kite story. I was impressed by the research that went into that story. And I, being a Japanese American, felt proud that there was a "comic book" that had some Japanese culture in it (even if they were usagi's and other animals .

The public library is a great place to discover comics.

Peace,

maka

[Fanfan]

Hmmm, after the posts of Cynlee, Steeve, Todd, my usagi’s story will be tasteless… as others I was watching TMNT but I don’t remember any episode with Usagi, perhaps it were never broadcasted in France ?

The first time I really saw Usagi was about 3 years ago, I was in the Arkham comic shop in Paris (to retrieve a David Mack Noh mask order, I didn’t know amazon.com at this time). And I saw a rabbit samurai ! wow! It hooked me, but the rate change was too bad to let me buy another stuff (i would have paid 2-3 times the real price and was just out of studies)… a few months later I always thought about usagi but there were no more usagi at Arkham… ( I don’t live in Paris so I don’t go there everyday !).

My usual comic shop did import Usagi so I could discover at last Usagi (one year after I first saw it), then I heard about a French edition, so I was patient and wait. I was so disappointed by this first edition (large sized ed) and in the midtime I discovered amazon.com, so I ordered US ed. However I get all French ed to encourage such initiative ! and I can lent to friends, and sometimes buy new ones because people want to keep usagi books… about 20 –30 (the number is still in progress) people I know now read usagi, and some booksellers too!

So today got UY softcover ed 1 to 18 (wait for the 19), the Art of UY, sketchbooks, some crossover with the TMNT, some episodes of TMNT on DVD (and one DivX ….), and my mail office did “lost” my usagi t shirts, and of course TFAW told me that they have all sold out…

As a conclusion : am more a book reader than a comic reader, but in my huge personal library Stan Sakai got a very important place, with my OE of Théophile Gautier and Pierre Louys (old French writers that are good nocturnal fellows…), my girlfriend laughs at me, cause I always got more usagi books and I have to reorganize all my personal library to still have all my usagi at a good place (under my view, near my hands), and it becomes harder every time I receive a new usagi book…

Got internet at home a few days before my inscription here, so it is really recent !, and I started my personal website, that should soon host a usagi section (a few animation for the moment).