Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 1: The Assassin's Road by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima

I read this whole series once, when everyone else did, starting in 2000 when this translation was originally published in the US. (I should note here that this volume - I think the whole series - was translated by Dana Lewis.)

But that's more than twenty years ago now, and I thought something like, "You know, maybe a twenty-eight volume series of three-hundred-page books about a guy chopping off heads, accompanied by his never-aging toddler son, set three hundred and fifty years ago in Japan, would be a fun reading project for 2024." So here I am, at the beginning of one of the acknowledged masterpieces of Japanese comics, and of world comics in general.

I probably won't have a lot to say. This series is remarkably resistant to commentary: it is what it is, and it is intensely itself. I gather it is the pinnacle of a whole style or genre of comics, one which was already mostly of historical interest in Japan when the US translation appeared - this is work from the early 1970s, back at the other end of my life, fifty years ago.

So what can I say about Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 1: The Assassin's Road? It was not the first collaboration between Kazuo Koike (writer) and Goseki Kojima (artist), but it was their longest, most fruitful project together. That's how canonical works work: they set the tone and the standard, and everything else is compared to them, generally as criticism.

This book contains nine stories, mostly around thirty pages long. It begins with our main characters already in their wandering life; we don't get the explanation until deep into this volume. But we do learn, eventually, that Ogami Ittō was once the shogun's executioner, one of the three main powers of the state, and that the head of the Yagyu ninja clan - the shogun's secret police, basically, another one of those three powers - betrayed him, framed him for treason, and set him up for death. Of course, Ittō instead fought his way free, with his infant son, and now wanders Japan as an assassin for hire.

As I recall, most of the stories are random jobs, like any series about a protagonist who wanders to do things. The central conflict comes back, again and again, and is concluded in the last volume - but that's about eight thousand pages in the future at this point. That's certainly the pattern here: one or two backstory tales, mostly wandering.

All of it is deeply atmospheric, both visually - in that slow-paced way that was such a shock to American audiences when we first saw it - and thematically, as Koike sets his story completely within the mindset of the people of the time. There is no winking, no modern viewpoint, no frame story: this is Ittō's world entirely, and all of the moral choices and societal attitudes are his, all from his point of view.

And he is declaredly on the road to hell, of his own will, to find his vengeance and die.

American comics readers now live in a world with many more options; we've all seen a lot of manga by now. Lone Wolf and Cub may not be as different as it was in 2000, not as stark a contrast - but I think it is still so much its own thing, so well-defined and fully-realized, that is is still as powerful and compelling.