Usagi Yojimbo DojoBoard

Colleen Coover mentions Stan as an influence in an interview:

CC: ...And every comic that I'd come across, I'd think about what these people were doing that worked. What is it about ["Usagi Yojimbo" creator] Stan Sakai that works?

CA: What is it about Stan Sakai that works?

CC: He has great storytelling, for one thing, and his textures are really amazing. It's all bunnies in samurai costumes, but he has such a good grasp on pattern and texture, so even though it's a black and white comic, you can see all the richness and even imagine the colors.

Usagi kills lots and lots of people.

That's what works for me.

Wait...what?

No idea who Colleen Coover is. I'm glad to see her giving Stan some much deserved recognition, but there's a lot more working for Stan and Usagi than that.

For me, the true secret ingredient that makes Stan and his work so incredible is the balance he walks between endearing, innocent simplicity and dark, savage complexity. His stories, characters, and art all walk this line with seeming effortlessness, providing a uniquely rich range of human emotion that is rarely seen in any kind of art or storytelling.

Usagi can feed orphans some sweets and tell the story of Momotaro or battle Jei to a desperate stalemate in the midst of a savage lightening storm. The two incidents are drawn thoroughly differently, even Usagi looks different, and the tone and complexity of the stories are totally different, yet we never doubt for a second that this is the same character in the same universe. We don't even bat an eye at these amazing transitions.

Another example -- Grasscutter versus the Tea Ceremony story.

Stan has an unsurpassed range in his ability to tell and illustrate his stories. I've never seen anything like it in comics, and the closest similarities I can think of in literature are Huck Finn and Harry Potter, yet even those don't capture the full range of human experience as thoroughly. They tend to get weighed down in the darkness, whereas Stan and Usagi can be back to munching on rice balls and feeding stray tokage on a moment's notice.