Found: Usagi Yojimbo Special
Who is Miyamoto Usagi? Whence does he come? Why is he on my Manga Charts?
From the Amazon listing:
Created in 1984as a supporting character for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo is a perennial favorite amongst children, especially boys, and adult fans. Usagi Yojimbo chronicles the action-packed wanderings of a funny-anima ronin in feudal Japan. In honor of his 25th anniversary, Fantagraphics is releasing a deluxe slipcase set collecting the seven first Usagi books, including the earliest stories; the origin story, “Samurai”, a full graphic novel; and literally dozens more. This is the complete, definitive Special Edition (our third in a line of repacking our most beloved classics). It will also have extra material, some from the long-out-of-print hardcover editions and some brand new: a complete full-color gallery of the more than 50 Usagi covers from that period (never-before-collected); many preparatory sketches; two “non-canon” Usagi stories by Sakai co-starring the TMNT (with whom Usagi also shared screen time in the TMNTs’ TV series); and a long career-spanning interview with Sakai.
The Usagi Yojimbo: Samurai GN namechecked above was originally published by Fantagraphics back in 1989. (And it’s a collection of earlier material) (and it’s only vol. 2 in the series, vol 1: Ronin, was first published in 1987)
—OEL Manga as a term can be applied to Sakai’s work, but he predates it. By a lot.
From the description above, this is merely a repackaging of the Fantagraphic editions of Usagi vols. 1-7, with maybe a new, eighth book with all those listed extras. If that’s all it is (1200 pages), it’s easily worth the $95. (not that we pay list price with all these websites out there trying to undercut each other)
isbn 9781606991541, as noted $95 list, currently advertised as a May 2009 release.
The ongoing adventures of Usagi Yojimbo are published by Dark Horse; vol. 22 came out last June.
Just a quick note to say that Amazon’s Product Description starts off with a very inaccurate and mis-leading statement.
“Created in 1984 as a supporting character for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles…”
Stan Sakai did create Usagi Yojimbo in 1984, the same year Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman created the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but Usagi was created completely independent of the TMNT.
Several years later, Eastman and Laird extended Sakai an invitation to have his character make a guest appearance on the TMNT animated series, and also be included in the related toy line.
As far as Usagi Yojimbo being manga? Here is a quote from a 2001 interview posted on the web-site for The Trades…
“R.J. CARTER: So Usagi is written and drawn by a Japanese-American creator; it’s set in medieval Japan. Does that qualify it as manga?
STAN SAKAI: I don’t believe it’s manga. The storytelling style is completely different from the Japanese style. In Western storytelling, there’s a beginning, middle and end. In Japanese storytelling, they concentrate so much on the middle, and sometimes the end is even unnecessary or not included in the storyline. I tend to write from a very European, or very Western, point of view and so I don’t believe I would consider it manga.”
To learn more about Usagi Yojimbo, visit the official web-site at:
www.usagiyojimbo.com
Comment by steve — 26 January 2009, 01:22 #
Thanks for the correction, Steve —
Considering I had to fix two punctuation and one grammatical error in the Amazon pull quote above, I’m not at all surprised to discover there were factual errors as well.
Comment by Matt Blind — 26 January 2009, 23:43 #