by SKIPPER PICKLE (REMEDIAL COMICS, MAY 23, 2007)
If you have the current version of the Adobe Flash Player, click the image to see how the page breaks down.
The simple flow of the page is straightforward. The composition of the first panel causes us to look down the long, empty street. Usagi’s gaze directs us through the other panels.
Each of Stan Sakai’s pages is a unified scene*, and his pages are rarely silent, as this one is. His battle scenes are often wordless, but not silent as this page is. When silence does occur in a Stan Sakai page, the quiet generally comes as a respite. That would be the case here, except for the spiders that keep interrupting the visual flow (note their placement along Usagi’s line of sight) and one other element, notable for its absence.
Stan Sakai works his extras hard. Any Usagi Yojimbo scene in an inhabited locale such as the village in this scene is generally bustling with activity, and you will see multiple characters in the background in the midst of very specific actions—chatting with each other, serving drinks, selling wares, carrying burdens. Always very busy. Here? There’s no one. Turn on Figures Only to see how from panel to panel, Usagi’s head goes left and right, back and forth, searching—there’s no one but spiders to see. The silence of this page begs for a portentous bird cry to punctuate the Eerie Stillness.
Turn on Images Only and Figure Silhouettes to look at the painstaking detail of the background textures and imagine what a therapeutic page this must have been to work on. It’s easy to imagine Stan Sakai pleased with himself and his composition, humming tunelessly, endlessly, bent over the page, working his way through the page.
Also of note for current readers of Usagi Yojimbo: this story is from 2000, the texturing and lines are very precisely placed. More recent Usagi shows a much looser line over the last few years. I don’t have any conclusions to draw about that, but it strikes me how rarely we have the opportunity to study a cartoonist over time, covering the same subject matter
This story is reprinted in Usagi Yojimbo: Demon Mask (Book 14). Text and illustrations ©1999, 2000, 2001 by Stan Sakai. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Comics, Inc.
* That I’ve finally noticed this obvious unity after years of Usagi-reading shows that the exercise continues to pay off for me.
Unfortunately, back when I originally saved this article, I did not save all the different images that were possible with the Adobe Flash Player. When I went back several years later to correct that problem, the article (and web-site) were no longer to be found.