When you think of highly influential comics in the canon over the past 50 or 60 years, I’d expect that you’d first probably think of the majors like Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns. Perennials within Western comics, whether the lessons taken from them are positive or not. As you get closer to the present, I suspect that many people would hit upon The Ultimates and Ultimate Spider-Man as game-changers as well. While informed by two different approaches from film, one widescreen action, the other often more told through looping dialogue, yet both championing a more decompressed style of storytelling.
You can easily point at big budget tent-pole action movies and the works of David Mamet as key influences, but what if I told you that there was a comic from Japan that likely influenced both? And probably at least The Dark Knight Returns in part as well. (I know, this is ultimately like saying Casablanca and Citizen Kane are somehow overlooked, but we can have tunnel vision on the superhero side of comics. I’m guilty of it too. Even with one of the most popular and influential manga of all time.)
“Having a kid along will shackle him, hand and foot…Lone Wolf and Cub?! Don’t make me laugh!”
I am, of course, talking about Lone Wolf & Cub by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, the first volume published by Dark Horse, The Assassin’s Road as translated by Dana Lewis with letters and art touch-ups by Digital Chameleon. It’s the collected stories of an itinerant ronin, Ogami Itto, and his little boy Daigoro, originally serialized in Japanese in the pages of Weekly Manga Action (漫画アクション ) in the ’70s.
I probably saw examples of the manga in various history of comics type books beforehand, but my major exposure to the series was through Dark Horse’s 28 book translations into English through the early to mid ’00s. And they opened my eyes to even more complex layers of storytelling within the medium. There are nine stories in the first volume and, while they are all firmly within the samurai genre set during the Tokugawa period, they offer up varied tales laden with political intrigue, philosophical debate, gang warfare, and family drama, all filled with an in-depth and nuanced approach to ethics and morality.
At the same time, you have artwork from Goseki Kojima that is impressive in its own fluidity. There’s the brutal violence of the action sequences, some titillation in the sex scenes, but there’s also a serenity in gorgeous nature sequences and the set up for many of the duels and battles. It feels like a mix of classical Japanese nature woodcuts and paintings and the sudden, quick action of samurai and crime movies. In a textured, shaded black and white.
The stories themselves take their time and breathe, influencing that decompressed storytelling that came to the fore in the late ’90s and early ’00s comics. The stories here are told according to their own pace, to lengths that feel natural to their own conclusions. So there’s never an instance where they feel like they’re drawn out to fill space or to fit a specific collected page count.
“The child of a wolf, my lord, is still a wolf.”
Lone Wolf & Cub – Volume 1: The Assassin’s Road by Koike & Kojima with Lewis and Digital Chameleon is a masterpiece. Right out of the gate it’s enthralling and complex in the stories that it’s telling and how it tells them. A gorgeous collection of cultural and historical importance of Japan’s history and philosophy, told through a highly entertaining samurai epic. Set up as the episodic tales of a travelling ronin in a way that allowed them to tell practically anything that they wanted.
Through both the recent beautiful hardcover edition and a digital bundle that included a whole wealth of Koike’s works, I decided to dive into the stories again and they’re just incredibly enriching. The only sad bit in the latter is that Kojima’s double page spreads are not presented digitally very well in the first volume (even breaking them when set to a two page display), though the art is still ultimately amazing (flipping the art to read left to right notwithstanding).
Classic Comic Compendium: LONE WOLF & CUB – VOL 1 – THE ASSASSIN’S ROAD
Lone Wolf & Cub – Volume 1: The Assassin’s Road
Writer: Kazuo Koike
Artist: Goseki Kojima
Translator: Dana Lewis
Letterer & Art Retouch: Digital Chameleon
Publisher: Dark Horse
Release Date: September 12 2000 (Dark Horse collected edition)
Also available collected in Lone Wolf & Cub Omnibus – Volume 1 and Lone Wolf & Cub Deluxe Edition – Volume 1
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