Usagi Yojimbo, Book 2: Samurai by Stan Sakai

The second collection of the long-running anthropomorphic samurai saga Usagi Yojimbo collects the first six issues of the ongoing series, the floppies starting in 1987 and the book appearing in 1989. It seems to be basically the same edition now as then: there are larger collected volumes available, and maybe a version under a slightly different title with added color, but if you picked up this book, in its first or tenth printing, it would be the same.

And, as is fairly typical for a series that started in anthologies (see the first Usagi book, The Ronin, for those initial stories), getting its own title meant a big "tell the backstory" saga. Most of Usagi Yojimbo, Book 2: Samurai is made up of the nine-part title story; there are three other short tales at the end. (So my impression is that each of these first two issues had two "stories," either sections of "Samurai" or one of the shorter pieces.)

"Samurai" is presented as a story Usagi - our hero, a highly skilled rabbit samurai in an Edo-era Japan full of various races of animals - is telling another ronin, after having just killed an old friend in a duel.

Friend? Yes: that's the hook.

Usagi starts with his youth, when he and another boy from the same village are sent off to study to become samurai, but take different paths along the way. They find different masters, separate for a long time, meet again at a tournament, and so on. (I should point out here that the boy from the village is not the friend Usagi kills in the present-day story; we already know what happened to that other boy in later life.)

After that, Usagi, having proved his skills, enters the service of a major feudal lord, and rises in the ranks to become a trusted bodyguard. But the war mentioned in the very first Usagi story hits, and we see Usagi's lord betrayed by a general and killed on the battlefield. All that explains why Usagi was after this "friend," and we come full circle in the end.

The other three stories are shorter, unconnected with the larger plotline. One is a spooky supernatural tale, another a sillier monster story with a baby "Zylla" (sparking the far too nudge-to-the-ribs dialogue line, "Are you a God, Zylla?" Har Har Har), and then a fairly standard stand-up-to-the-evil-capitalist story.

All of this is solid work, both in writing and art: Sakai is fairly wordy here, in that late-80s style, but he has a lot to explain. It's pitched at an "all-ages" level - samurai fights lead to immediate death without obvious blood, the possibility of sexual assault of village maidens is hinted at but not followed up, that sort of thing - that I might find limiting, if the entire multi-thousand-page series stays at that acceptable-to-tweens level.

Sakai is good at storytelling, though he doesn't let his pages extend the way his Japanese models do - he didn't have the luxury of a studio full of assistants and the demands of a weekly magazine wanting a couple of dozen pages, I suppose - and his lines are crisp and evocative.

Still, there is something inherently derivative here: it's modeled on something like a dozen Japanese originals, both movies and manga, and I struggle to come up with a good reason to insist that readers should go here rather than to those originals. Usagi is fine work, absolutely, but fine work acting as a mirror for even better work.

My assumption is that Usagi Yojimbo becomes more itself as it goes along, and I'll continue, watching for that.