Usagi Yojimbo, Book 5: Lone Goat and Kid by Stan Sakai

Thirty-some years ago, Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo series ran bi-monthly, and these early collections each gathered six issues. (It looks like the late collections also tend to gather six issues, but I'm not there yet.) So each book is basically a year of samurai-rabbit action: this one has the issues that hit between December 1989 and September 1990, numbers 19-24.

Unlike the previous book (The Dragon Bellow Conspiracy), Usagi Yojimbo, Book 5: Lone Goat and Kid doesn't have a single multi-part storyline. There is a two-parter, "Blood Wings," which features a clan of ninja bats, but the other four issues are mostly standalone.

Sakai tells all those stories well, and in different ways: he starts out with the straightforward moral-conflict story "Frost & Fire", with Usagi sent to retrieve a dead samurai's swords for that late samurai's haughty wife, only to find he had abandoned her for a lower-class woman. "A Kite Story" is a lighter story of cheating gamblers during a festival, told in multiple overlapping sections with different viewpoints. Then "Blood Wings" provides the major ninja action for this book - and some questions in the reader's minds about how this anthropomorphic world really works: if some of the races of people can fly, that should probably have made a lot of history different in this world than our, right? Right?

The last two stories are related, with Usagi first meeting an aged, dying hero put out to pasture as the administrator of a minor town (and convincing him to finish his work rather than trying to die in battle), and then fighting the semi-parody of the title as a consequence. (There's also the machinations of the usual Big Bads of the series behind that last fight, too - stories with ninjas and scheming feudal lords are really big on the "let's you and him fight" plot.)

The tone and level of the stories is consistent as before: Sakai is telling samurai stories, slightly sanded down, so they're appropriate for American middle-schoolers. I do find the sanding occasionally obvious, and sometimes regrettable, but it's the way he wanted to tell these stories and the audience he was aiming for. His art is crisp and fun, solid at storytelling, even if I don't spend a lot of time trying to decide what kind of animals everyone is.

For new or random readers: you can probably pick up any random Usagi volume, though you'll probably want to pick ones with multiple stories, like this one. He's a rabbit, he's a ronin, it's otherwise Edo-era Japan - that's all you need to know.