Usagi Yojimbo DojoBoard

I was placing an order through Amazon.fr for the two most recent digest sized volumes of Usagi Yojimbo from Paquet, and I decided to add this on to the order. Too bad there is not an english language version of this....



Title: Zatoïchi
Drawing: Hiroshi Hirata
Screenplay: Hiroshi Hirata
Format: 127 x 180 mm
Number of Pages: 190
Release Date: 25/01/2006
Translation Tetsuya Yano
Adaptation: Frédéric Guyader
Lettering: Eric Montesinos

This one-shot offers two short stories:

"The Ballad of Zatoichi"

Zatoïchi, a blind masseur particularly adroit in handling the sword, will be confronted with a strange monk, blind as well. Witness a heinous murder, the masseur will find himself drawn into a story of blackmail against the merchants of a small village. Having stolen the purse of the man who had just been executed, he will be facing a cruel dilemma ...

"Zatoichi crosses the sea"

Still bound by a promise to a man he has just cut without any real intention to kill him, Zatoïchi goes east, in this second story, once again the target of a yakuza group. They will manipulate a young child to attract Zatoïchi in a trap ...

(story descriptions translated from french by google)

I didn't even know that there were any Zatoichi manga. I like Hiroshi Hirata's artwork a lot, so that's icing on the cake. I can read just a tiny bit of French, but not enough to read a whole comic book in French, so that would be a problem for me. (I can read Spanish a little bit better because I actually took a few semesters of it in college; the closest I ever came to taking French was a French film course that was conducted in English.)

We already have talked of the novel here

The "novel" is just a tale from Kan Shimozawa. This manga is the adaptation of the 14th en 15th movie (1966), Shonen gasho-ha wanted to work with Hirata and asked him to create a manga inspired by a movie. Hirata worked directly from scenario without watching the movies.

Hirata's work published in french :

Satsuma, 6 vol


Kyudo's soul


Killer with a talkon the french dojo with Sensei

You can see on dailymotion a french documentary about manga, the introduction shows Hirata in France dressed like a samurai doing some caligraphia
http://www.dailymotion.com/fireshoot/vi ... rance-2-13

Title that should come : forgotten samurai

I was definitely disappointed when Dark Horse discontinued the Satsuma Gishiden mini-series after only three volumes. I never even heard why they decided not to finish translating the series either.