COOL NEWS
Published on Wednesday, August 9, 2006 - 9:03am
Personnally, I do not agree Dave Farabee's comments and opinions expressed in this review. I guess when Dave Farabee has actually written and drawn his own comic series for even close to twenty years, we can review an issue and see how cliched his characters, plots, and creativity is.Dave Farabee wrote:USAGI YOJIMBO #95
Writer/Artist: Stan Sakai
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
Reviewed by Dave Farabee
Everyone who's read the adventures of the rabbit samurai, Usagi Yojimbo, loves them. Everyone who's met its creator, Stan Sakai, loves him. His books picked up several Eisner awards and had over a dozen nominations. The trade collections have featured introductory testimonials by luminaries ranging from Jeff Smith to Will Eisner to Paul Dini to Alejandro Jodorowsky.
With all that love circulating...
Let's say some mean stuff about USAGI YOJIMBO, shall we?
Okay, I'm being a little facetious, but not completely. I've got a heap of USAGI trades on my bookshelf and generally speaking, much love for the book (here's a column that sees me offering up a loving review of an issue from some years ago)...BUT...over time I've come to realize that USAGI's not above criticism, not without its flaws. And while I highly recommend it to just about anyone with a taste for adventure and/or interest in the samurai of Japan, I thought it might be interesting to look at an issue from a more critical perspective.
To wit:
USAGI YOJIMBO #95 is, in many ways, a typical USAGI story. It stands completely on its own, yet sets up future conflict, and serves up a tragic melodrama while enlightening the reader on feudal Japan (specifically the beggar's guild and the life of the paid assassin). All good, right? Well, let's give this latest some scene-by-scene scrutiny and see. The first few pages are previewed at Dark Horse's site if you want to read `em before continuing.
"Shizukiri", named for the grim assassin who makes his appearance later in the story, opens with a hapless pair of beggars driven off by a merchant and a prostitute. First time readers may be surprised to see realities like prostitution acknowledged given USAGI's cartoony visuals, but that's normal for the book. As are the rather flat characters and their dialogue (Merchant: "Ooo! I like a feisty woman." Prostitute: "A rich merchant like you can easily afford my company tonight.") While the book's all-ages agenda is one of its finest qualities, I do find myself wishing a bit more nuance went into the scripting. Sakai often shorthands the characterization of merchants, beggars, thieves and other commoners of feudal Japan into cliché and I mostly feel these cliché are steeped in reality, but surely some richness of the era is lost when dialogue and characterization become so perfunctory.
Things go from bad to worse for the father/son pair of beggars when they chance across a cruel samurai who casually murders the son...simply to test his newly-bought blade. High points to Sakai for such a shocking scene. On the downside, the image of the dead son is accompanied by Sakai's recurring visual motif for death: a word balloon coming from the character with a little skull in it. The surprisingly comic nature of that motif, alongside the father's hoary "SOB! SOB! SOB!" response, blunts the edge of the death. On one hand, it keeps the book relatively friendly to younger readers, keeps it from becoming morose; on the other hand, if you follow the book for any length of time, you might find its visual levity increasingly unwelcome. What's more, the callousness of the samurai is played without subtlety, discussing drinks with his friend while a father cries over his son's corpse. It's not the concept but the heavy-handed depiction (more "SOB! SOB! SOBs!" from the father) that has it careening into maudlin territory.
Immediately following the incident (USAGI's not a book to lollygag), we see an assassin being procured by the "Union of Beggars" in response. Turns out, the murderous samurai holds a high rank -- untouchable by the law, but not by the vengeful. Love the idea, here, and I also enjoyed the assassin's no-nonsense agreement to their conditions (with just enough left unsaid that there's a damn good surprise at the end). Poking around online, I learned that the assassin, Shizukiri, has faced off with Usagi in a past issue I've either missed or forgotten, but I was impressed that the reader learns everything he needs to know about him during the course of the story.
Later scenes depict Shizukiri with his wife, the prostitute from the opening sequence. She's troubled by his drinking and they both hate each other's choice of career. Alas, much of the resulting dialogue is straightforward, borderline cliché Shizukiri: "I'm tired of all this death. This will be my last job! No more killing for me."), though I enjoyed the alienness of the culture that might chalk their tragic lives up to inescapable karma ("I was born to be a prostitute, and this is how I will die.") Still, it's hard to get past the ol' "one more job and we can start a new life" bit.
What follows is a lot of blood-letting, courtesy of Shizukiri. I don't want to ruin the finale with a play-by-play, but my issues with Sakai's bloodless, cartoony depiction of death all recur. Corpses pile up inconsequentially like the bad guys in an Arnie flick, which'd be fine if the story was more escapist. Sakai's going for gravitas, though. And he does manage to pull off one of the finale's two surprises with a deft touch in spite of the throwaway kills. The other surprise, concerning Shizukiri's wife, only brought home the book's contrivances and cliché. What should have been a truly emotional scene falls flat on its face as a result.
To some degree, USAGI is one of those books that simply is what it is. It has today all the same strengths and weaknesses that it had when it debuted over 20 years ago. And some of those weaknesses may just be inherent in Sakai shooting for the widest audience possible (though I sometimes wonder if USAGI's percentage of youth readers is even in the double digits). In any case, I do respect its stability. I like the idea of new generations discovering intact the heroes and legends of previous generations. It's one of the reasons I prefer the "illusion of change" for the big superheroes over actual change. But it can be frustrating for the longtime reader. And if you find over time that you've got some core issues with a book (for USAGI, the flat supporting characters, the sometimes contrived melodrama, the casual depiction of death), it can be hard to sign on for the long haul.
For me, that's meant limiting myself to reading USAGI in progressively smaller doses, even though any given issue has moments that still intrigue. So I recommend the series in spite of my own waning interest, especially to readers who've yet to sample it. But I have to wonder at how amazing it'd be if Stan could do a little retooling of his approach, bringing some nuance and throwing off the shackles of cliché
I would very much like to see that.
Here is his previous column, which was linked to the newer review.
Published on Wednesday, June 11, 2003 - 8:38am
Dave Farabee wrote: USAGI YOJIMBO #66
Writer/Artist: Stan Sakai
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
Reviewed by Cormorant
It was roughly ten years ago that I first came across Stan Sakai's saga of a wandering bunny samurai. Now the only time I'd ever seen a cartoon bunny that was meant to be taken seriously was in the animated adaptation of WATERSHIP DOWN, but that blood-soaked tale of heroic survival left an indelible impression on me, so I was at least open to the possibilities of "bunny cool." This, coupled with fond memories of sword-wielding turtles in the early, black-and-white years of the Ninja Turtle craze led me to flip through an issue. The first page I flipped to just happened to have the titular Usagi - a masterless samurai - performing crude surgery to remove a broken arrow shaft from a semi-conscious comrade. There were three or four grueling panels of this poor bastard being held down (thankfully off-screen) while Usagi fished around in his stomach to dislodge the arrow. Afterwards, a heated sword blade was pressed to the wound to cauterize it.
Disney this book ain't.
I immediately became a dedicated follower of the series, collecting back issues in trades and following the series as it migrated from Fantagraphics to Mirage before finally finding it's current home at Dark Horse. Ostensibly the series is "all ages," and indeed, it's the kind of comic I'd have killed to have known about when I was in grade school, but the grim scene I described is not atypical. The influence of Akira Kurosawa casts a long shadow over the cartoony characters of the series, and tales of violence, tales of class struggles, of war and of rape, have all been told. Throughout, Stan Sakai has infused the book with heavy doses of Japanese feudal history and daily life, lending it an effortless and painless didactic undertone. Every once in a while, though, Sakai breaks from the epics for a bit of fun: murder mysteries, horror stories steeped in Japanese folklore, or, in the case of the current issue, Stan's tribute to Japan's tradition of giant monster stories!
"You mean?he fights Godzilla'"
Well, not quite, but we do get no less than two fights with giant monsters in this opening chapter ? nothing to sneeze at. As Usagi is traveling between towns with his son, Jotaro, he first encounters a giant centipede and later, a "Mothra"-inspired giant moth who causes windstorms with the flapping of his big honkin' wings. Needless to say, swords are drawn and monsters hacked! The good guys also find themselves aided by a former ally, the demon-hunter, Sasuka. Sasuka's a handy guy because he knows how to do outrageous stuff like lick his arrows before firing them into the eyes of the big centipede. Hey, it's just common sense if you know your Japanese folklore, smart-BADWORD, saliva apparently being poison to these things. Sasuka even knows the source of the monsters: a cursed brush-and-ink set from which any image drawn becomes reality. He's got a good guess that the artist behind them is in the area, too; children have been disappearing and, gruesomely, the blood of children is precisely what's needed to make the magicked ink.
WEIRD!
But cool. And the story of how something so innocuous as a brush-and-ink set could become cursed turns out to be pretty entertaining in and of itself. Most mythology geeks know Greek and Norse mythology, maybe a little Egyptian stuff for good measure, but Japanese myths and folklore remain unknown to most Westerners, and are appealingly exotic in books like USAGI YOJIMBO. As a bonus, Sakai includes some text history on the letters page, concerning both Japanese pen-and-ink drawings and legit "giant monster" folklore.
Sakai's visuals are instantly inviting, and not dissimilar to the detailed, textured work of Sergio Aragones whose goofy classic, GROO, Sakai has always lettered. Sakai's work is manga-influenced in its cinematic staging and perfect grasp of the black-and-white aesthetic, but "American" enough that the stories and action scenes don't beat around the bush. Remember - this single issue has not one, but two monster fights! In your face, trendy decompressed storytelling! Take notice, too, of the total lack of "special effects" like digital blurring or even pre-made halftones. Gives the book the sort of purity that comes from knowing that one artist did everything.
So what's up with the "funny animal" designs' I've always assumed that Stan decided to make USAGI an anthropomorphic-themed comic for the same reasons Disney and Warner Brothers use animal characters ? the wild designs make characters instantly recognizable and are innately appealing to kids. That Usagi has rabbit characteristics, and others the features of bats, snakes, or foxes doesn't signify anything about their personalities ? these are just distinctive visual flourishes, and fun ones at that. Reading this book doesn't make you a "furry" (pop culture slang for the folks who fixate on anthropomorphic characters, sometimes even in?*cringe*?naughty ways), nor does it reveal kiddified tastes. Trust me. The USAGI trades have featured introductions from professionals as disparate as Paul Dini, Will Eisner, James Robinson, and Alexandro Jodorowsky. You don't rally that kind of support without having truly wide-ranging appeal.
The only downside to this new arc is that it's fairly light on characterization, being more of an action showcase than one of the series' epics. Interested newcomers are therefore advised to seek out the early Fantagraphics trades (also a timely means of helping Fantagraphics out of their current economic crisis!). I especially recommend Book 4, "The Dragon Bellow Conspiracy," an epic-length adventure uniting Usagi and a host of heroes and scoundrels against a conspiracy to overthrow the Shogun. On the other hand, it doesn't have giant moths getting plugged with fire-arrows, so maybe you should check out this latest issue after all.
