Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 10: Hostage Child by Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima

Lone Wolf and Cub is a twenty-eight volume series, collecting a serialized story that originally appeared in installments in the early '70s in the aptly titled Weekly Manga Action. Now, each installment is long: fifty pages, sometimes longer. But they often tend to be separate, each one an adventure or encounter of the main character, former imperial executioner Ogami Ittō.

But, sometimes, the stories in a particular collection - I think the English-language editions of this series actually are in tankōbon format, unlike most manga, which is closer to bunkoban or the US-specific "Tokyopop trim" - are more closely related, and form something like a story arc.

Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 10: Hostage Child is one of those. It starts with a massive battle, in "The Yagyū Letter," which is, if I recall correctly, the first big battle between Ittō and the forces of the evil ninja Yagyū clan. Since there's still several thousand pages of story to go, neither Ittō nor Yagyū Retsudō, his nemesis, are completely victorious, though they do get to cross swords in between Ittō killing just about everyone else in the scene. (Samurai stories, like cowboy stories, usually have a character who is vastly better at dealing out death than is plausible - it's just a trope of the genre, and we have to accept it.)

In the aftermath of "The Yagyū Letter," Ittō is separated from his son Daigorō, and the narrative hints that he might be dead. (Of course he isn't; that's the whole point of this series.) But we get two stories of Daigorō's adventures without his father, and then two more showing what they do separately as Ittō  follows the tracks of his son's path. Daigorō is saved by a former samurai, whose death - and that of his mentally disabled son - allows Daigorō to flee. In the second all-Daigorō story, various peasants are amazed and astonished at his shishōgan eyes and calm demeanor, while a temple priestess (I think) loudly insists they should send the kid away because he's bad luck.

She is correct, but that's kind of the point of every Lone Wolf and Cub story: crossing the paths of either Ogami is likely to shorten your life, often down to the next few minutes. 

The last story here sees a starving and nearly-dead Daigorō picked up and nursed back to health by a bandit as a "straw boy" - he and his two henchmen can travel more easily if they're not obviously a band of thugs, and a little boy helps sell that story. Since this means Daigorō is "working" - he's a look-out for the gang, among other things - the kid then allows himself to be fed and regains his strength. The authorities are close on the bandit's tail, though, and everyone but Daigorō dies in the end.

Daigorō has not reunited with his father Ittō yet; I assume that will happen in the next volume. And Yagyū Retsudō and his remaining forces are still nearby - I think; it can be difficult to follow the geography in this series - ready to attack once again. So danger still lurks, as always, but Ittō and his fancy sword will be slicing torsos for another eighteen volumes to come.