What We’re Reading: Usagi Yojimbo Special Edition
Usagi Yojimbo: The Special Edition by Stan Sakai (Fantagraphics, 2015)
In Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo, the titular character, Usagi Miyamoto, is a masterless samurai who wanders through Edo-period Japan. Broadly, the Special Edition collects the first nine years of Usagi: his first appearances in various furry animal anthologies and all 38 issues published by Fantagraphics. Additionally, there’s a how-to by the author, rare Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cameos, and an in-depth interview. The two books come in a handsome slipcase with striking colors, and the pages, despite being very thin, immaculately hold Sakai’s linework. Physically speaking, my only complaint is that the covers tend to warp; maybe some nice French flaps would have fixed that.
As for the stories themselves, well, Usagi spends a lot of time walking. While walking, he consistently revisits places both physically (his home village or the palace of Lord Noriyuki) and in memory (Adachi Plain, the site of the battle where Usagi’s lord died). Tropes are also constantly revisited and revised: Usagi sleeps in a haunted shack owned by a haunted woman; two woodcutting peasants cross Usagi’s path; or Usagi squabbles with bounty hunter Gen and blind masseur Zato Ino. The comic is iterative, constantly running its characters through the same equations.
Is this sort of repetition bad? In our world of remakes and sequels, there’s a certain stench, a certain wariness about retreading old ground. In American adventure comics, though, it’s almost a tradition. This is partly because these comics were one of the last refuges for untrained artists—they were arenas where people with moderate skills could get paid while they learned their craft. Some of the most historically important adventure comics—the origins of Superman and Batman, the first appearances of the Guardians of the Galaxy, the early issues of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are naive and primitive stories. Because of this, they’re constantly revised as comics’ cultural cachet rises and cartoonists with more polish work on established properties.
This holds for the earliest Usagi stories, especially the ones from the Albedo and Critters anthologies. The characters are strangely proportioned and inconsistently portrayed. The hatching is ill-considered and ends up flattening the image instead of adding texture. The narration is blunt and boring. For example, here’s a mess of patterns and anatomy that’s very hard to read:
It’s joyous to watch how fast Sakai gets better. His pattern-making becomes a consistent backdrop, a foundation, for the pacing of the series. The wavy tree bark, the gentle fields, and the sound, believable buildings join into a rhythm of world-building that works as an attractive tableau without distracting from the characters. Here’s a much clearer panel, where each pen stroke carries much more weight:
Just as Sakai grows and changes by iterating on his settings and characters, Usagi returns to the same places again and again. However, instead of retreading the same dramas, each visit changes Usagi and is shaded by said changes. Despite superficially seeming to repeat itself, each repetition is a chance to show the small ways Usagi has changed. For example, Usagi is warned early on that he’s too inflexible and too willing to fight. On his first return to his home village, the tension with his childhood rival, Kennichi, is thick and overt. On future visits, though, after Usagi has seen the consequences of violence and hot-headedness, he becomes more patient with Kennichi and more accepting of Kennichi’s marriage to Mariko, Usagi’s first sweetheart.
Usagi Yojimbo, through its wanderings, shows what it takes to really know a person or place. A single experience, no matter how powerful, is only a single view. It takes spiraling around a place, seeing it in every season, and knowing it will change as you change.
