Usagi Yojimbo, Book 6: Circles by Stan Sakai

This sixth volume is slightly longer than the previous ones, collecting seven issues of the Usagi Yojimbo series (#25 - 31, November 1990 through November 1991), plus a story from the anthology Critters #38. But it's otherwise much like the previous books, down to the mixture of one-off stories (several of the issues collected) and a longer "mythology" multi-parter in which our hero returns to his home village, hoping to settle down and get out of the killing-random-people business. Of course, if he could do that, the series would end, and there are seventeen more volumes of this series, so...you can guess he learns the old Thomas Wolfe lesson.

Usagi Yojimbo: Circles was originally published in the early nineties; the current edition (no indications of what's different; it's probably not much) is from 2014. It has four stories up front - three of them full-length, and one ten-pager, "Yurei" - and the four-part "Circles" to close out the book. It also has an introduction from Jeff Smith, dated 1994, which is a bit of a time capsule itself.

In "Circles," we learn that sex actually does happen in this very tween-friendly world, although it happens, as far as we see, in a chaste embrace while both characters are still fully dressed. Still, baby steps. And I should say that I am too cynical and jaded to be a really good guide to Usagi Yojimbo: I enjoy it and appreciate creator Stan Sakai's story-telling ability while still seeing it both as a very second-hand thing (an American riff on the historical fiction of actual Japanese people about their actual history) and as something deliberately cleaned up and sanded down for that younger audience. (To be blunt, I don't see why an adult would read this rather than going to the seinen classics like Lone Wolf and Cub: it is very much a derivative version of those.)

So Usagi battles a demon (not quite a troll, but the same sort of thing) in "The Bridge," protecting the village he's just wandered into randomly. He gets caught up in a gambler's scheme in "The Duel," unwittingly, and of course kills the gambler's hand-picked fighter, which is sad for that guy's wife and child. (There's also a fair bit of cop-movie-style "I'll just do This One Last Job, honey, and then we'll have enough money to retire from This Dangerous Life forever!" which is as ironic as it always is, in the same ways.) "Yurei" sees Usagi help out a ghost after mostly forgetting what she told him, in the traditional way of causing those who caused her death to die themselves. And "My Lord's Daughter" is a very over-the-top, battle-heavy story, full of monsters, in which Usagi fights through hordes to save the title character from a gigantic, vicious Oni and its minions...and which turns out to be a bedtime story Usagi is telling a bunch of kids, showing Sakai realizes what the whole of Usagi Yojimbo is, and is willing to joke about it.

Then we hit "Circles," which is the story of Usagi going back to the village where he grew up, and hoping to settle there. He first learns that his old teacher, who lives in a remote location not far from the village, is surprisingly still alive - Usagi last saw him falling from a high cliff towards the usual rapids - which is encouraging. But the new village headman, Kenichi, is married to the girl Usagi loved, Mariko, - they had a rivalry about that, among other things - and doesn't like or trust him at all. Meanwhile, the creepy supernatural samurai Jei from the third book is back - from the dead, actually - and is leading a band of bandits to find and kill Usagi on behalf of (he claims) the gods. Jei does have supernatural powers, so, on balance, I'm willing to grant that some gods are on his side

Jei's bandits threaten and harass and raid the village. Kenichi and Usagi, as the two trained samurai, lead the villagers in fighting them off and planning a counter-attack, but Kenichi's young son Jotaro is nabbed by the bandits, raising the stakes. There's a big fight, Usagi kills Jei once again, and Jotaro is saved. But Usagi learns a deep secret, and has to leave the village because of it, never to settle there. (He could, of course, settle somewhere else, and he'll probably think of that eventually - but the point of a wandering-samurai series is for the samurai to wander, so don't expect it any time soon.)

As before, this is well-done samurai action, in a register suitable for middle-grade readers. Sakai is a fine story-telling cartoonist, adept at large groups of random animal-headed people fighting with each other with medieval weaponry, and every bit of Usagi Yojimbo I've seen has been solid adventure-story material, superbly crafted with a fine control of tone to hit both comedic and dramatic moments. I still think the originals Sakai used as models are better and more interesting, but this is both excellent and something you can hand to your tweens without worry.

Usagi Yojimbo, Book 4: The Dragon Bellow Conspiracy by Stan Sakai

The fourth collection of Stan Sakai's long-running Usagi Yojimbo series collects a long - some would say "epic" - storyline that started in 1989 and ran through six issues of the comic. It's largely the "gather all of the popular, previously separate, supporting characters" arc, and it has the same largely historical accurate but softened for tween readers tone as the rest of Usagi. [1]

In the interests of clarity, I should note that "Dragon" is a metaphor and "Conspiracy" is overblown: this is one feudal lord, conspiring with only his own lord and minions, planning in secret to launch a rebellion that could, potentially, maybe, topple the Shogun and would definitely knock off a couple of his local rivals and give him much more power and influence. "Dragon Bellow" is an artsy way of saying he's going to use guns to do that.

Thus Usagi Yojimbo Book 4: The Dragon Bellow Conspiracy. There are basically two intersecting stories, neither one of which initially involves Usagi, our rabbit-samurai hero.

In the main plot, good-guy (super-literally: he is drawn as a baby panda) Lord Noriyuki thinks his neighbor Lord Tamikuro is up to something mischievous. Tamikuro is a supporter of Lord Hikiji, the big bad of the series, who is continually scheming to depose the shogun. (Everyone seems to know this - perhaps except for the shogun.)

So Noriyuki sends a delegation to visit Tamikuro, led by the female samurai Tomoe Ame, who Usagi met and almost had a romance with in a previous story. And of course Tamikuro is scheming, having gathered a large stockpile of guns, and will be attacking Noriyuki any day now. Tomoe attempts to get back to her lord with the big news, but is captured.

Meanwhile, the ronin Gen (a big, mostly honorable rhino) is chasing the blind swords-pig Ino for the bounty on the latter's head. Both of them had been occasional allies of Usagi in the past, and they're heading through this same territory right now.

Usagi gets pulled into the story as he's also traveling through this region on foot: he sees Tamikuro's forces riding off with a captured Tomoe and tries to follow. But a rabbit on foot is no match for multiple...cats?...on horseback, so he's quickly left behind. He did hear her call out something about warning Noriyuki, and is torn between saving the damsel from unknown peril or warning the lord "hey, your samurai damsel is in some kind of peril." While pondering, he wanders into what had been a secret ninja village - they're like carpenter ants, there's one behind every hillside in this region - to find all the inhabitants had been slaughtered.

Quick background note, to explain what readers learned in bwa-ha-ha style gloating dialogue among the villains: this particular group of ninjas is opposed to Hijiki, for whatever reason, and has been spying on Tamikuro, trying to figure out his plans. So Tamikuro had his men slaughter their village.

Anyway, Usagi is an honorable rabbit, so he drags all of the dead bodies into one hut, in hopes some kin will eventually bury them. He is witnessed leaving the village, with not a little blood on him, by Shingen, a leader of those ninja, who has the reasonable misapprehension that Usagi was responsible. So he starts following Usagi to take his vengeance.

After more than a little swordfighting and yelling at each other, the good guys not in Tamikuro's prison - to sum up: Usagi, Shingen, Gen, and Ino - meet, work out their differences at least temporarily, and band together to assault Tamikuro Fortress with a force of those handy ninja.

There are battles, there are deaths, there is a conspiracy foiled. But, in the middle-grade friendly standard for the series, no recurring characters are harmed in the melee. As usual, I'm finding Usagi Yojimbo to be well-constructed, beautifully drawn, and compellingly told - but inherently a watered-down story for young readers. It definitely has a niche, but I'm finding that niche increasingly restrictive as the story goes on.

[1] See my posts on books one, two, and three for more details on the series, if you're interested.

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.

Usagi Yojimbo, Book 8: Shades of Death by Stan Sakai

This one was a professional transition - it collects the first six issues (plus stories from issues seven and eight) of the second series of Usagi Yojimbo, from Mirage - but, within the story, there's no indication of that. Creator Stan Sakai didn't reboot the series, drop into long explanatory flashback stories for the relaunch, or even make much of an apparent effort to attract any new readers. Well, it was 1993, when "long-running" was a selling point for a comic, unlike today.

As it was, the Mirage series only lasted sixteen issues, and they didn't manage to publish any collections - this eighth book, and all of the subsequent book-format Usagi materials (I think; there's been a lot of them and I might be missing some odd item) came out from Dark Horse, which started the third Usagi series in 1996 and published 165 issues over the next twenty years.

That's the background of Usagi Yojimbo Book 8: Shades of Death, which was originally published in 1997. The current edition, which I read digitally, is from 2010; it doesn't say what was different but my guess is that it was mostly trade dress - there's no sign that Sakai changed any of the stories fifteen years later.

Shades includes seven stories, all of which stand alone and don't directly connect to each other. (When your main character is a wandering adventurer who's solo most of the time, you can just make stories as you feel like it, and they line up just fine.) Two of them, "Shades of Green" and "Shi," are long three-parters, sixty-some pages each. Two more - the wordless "The Lizards' Tale" and the flashback "Battlefield" - are about the length of a single issue, in the low twenty-page range. The last three, "Jizo," "Usagi's Garden," and "Autumn," are eight-pagers that presumably were backup stories.

Three of those stories feature Usagi as a young rabbit - a kit, I suppose - learning Important Life Lessons from his sensei, Katsuichi. Usagi has never been officially a book for young readers, but it's always been young-reader-adjacent, with any sex kept implied and the violence stylized enough to pass, and these three pieces show that side of the series strongly: as always, Usagi Yojimbo was a comic told in a register suitable for tweens.

The jump to Mirage also meant another crossover with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; Usagi had met one of them (Leo, maybe?) a few times before, but now all four of the TMNT are summoned to this cod-Edo-Japan world by the traditional old guy (who, unsubtly, Sakai draws to look just like their leader, Splinter) to battle side-by-side with Usagi and defeat the evil ninja, in the first story of the book, "Shades of Green."

There are other evil ninja in other stories, too: that's how cod-Edo-Japan stories work: noble samurai battle fiendish ninja, and of course prevail in the end. This isn't "the end" - Sakai had another four thousand-plus story pages still to come (and I'm not sure that he isn't still adding more on, even now) - but you know what I mean.

Usagi stories are dependable and fairly predictable, but, luckily, the American comics audience for the past eighty years has craved monthly doses of exactly the same thing, only with slightly different covers so they know to buy it again. So Usagi has been successful commercially, and it's pretty successful artistically - as long as you like this sort of thing and are comfortable with the moral lessons inherent in any stories about violence experts.

Usagi Yojimbo, Book 10: The Brink of Life and Death by Stan Sakai

This tenth collection of the long-running Usagi Yojimbo series gathers eight full issues - the last two of the short Mirage second volume and the first six of the much longer Dark Horse run - along with one last backup story from an earlier Mirage issue. It originally appeared in 1998, soon after the stories were in floppy form, and was updated somehow or somewhat for the current 2010 edition. (The book doesn't say what changed - it doesn't list the 1998 date anywhere but in the byline of Kurt Busiek's introduction - but I suspect it was only a new cover and trade dress.)

If you didn't know these stories were published in that way, you wouldn't be able to tell, although creator Stan Sakai did make a four-page all-splash-page story for the first DH issue, which comes first in this book. (But that's the kind of thing a reader might assume is first in every book - and, frankly, something like it probably should be, especially in a series that now runs more than forty volumes.)

It's called Usagi Yojimbo, Book 10: The Brink of Life and Death - that's not the title of any of the individual stories here, so I think it's just a general "hey! find the hot samurai action you love here!" signpost.

As before, I enjoy these stories a lot - Sakai is a fine storyteller, with a precise clean line, compelling but unfussy layouts, naturalistic dialogue and a knack for ringing small changes on genre furniture to tell stories that work well and seem familiar - while finding the whole package just a bit lesser than I was hoping for. One part of that, which I've written about for previous books, is the all-ages nature of Sakai's stories: he's writing for tweens and up, which means sex is all offstage (and not a driver of plots) and violence is the usual stylized flashing swords and falling bodies.

But another piece of it, which just came into focus for me with this book, is Usagi's role in the story. I won't say that he never changes, since I'm only a quarter of the way into a four-decade series. But the whole thing is like an '80s TV show - think The Hulk or The A-Team - where a well-defined character comes into town, fixes something wrong, and moves on as the theme music plays at the end of the episode. Usagi is important, but he's unstoppable in battle, unflappable in conversation, and unerring in his judgement. He's more of an icon than a person: the perfect ronin, always friendly to peasants and children, always ready to fight bandits or help out a friend, always able to escape any danger.

That's pleasant, but it's not really a person.

That figure runs through the nine stories here, meeting some new people and some old friends, having some vaguely tragic things happen to other people which he can help mitigate later or just nod grimly in his perfect-samurai manner. But, most of the time, he's able to stop the vaguely tragic things from happening, for those peasants and children and friends, and then walk on towards the next story.

I can wish for more, but that's what Usagi Yojimbo is. And there's a word for doing the same thing repeatedly - e.g. reading Usagi Yojimbo stories - and expecting something different. What's here is just fine, especially if you want to share them with smaller, shorter, younger people infesting your home.

Usagi Yojimbo, Book 1: The Ronin by Stan Sakai

We all have holes in our reading, some more surprising than others. I started reading "comics" seriously about 1986, when I went off to college to a town (Poughkeepsie) with a good shop (Iron Vic's) and bought mostly the weirdest stuff I could find on the racks at that time. There's a lot that I've read since then, sometimes by following the same creators and ideas, sometimes by deliberately paying attention to new things (manga! YA! Eurocomics!). But no one can read everything - no one wants to read everything, to begin with, and it's not physically possible now, if it ever was.

So I've known who Stan Saki was almost since that first trip to a comics shop in 1986 - maybe even earlier, since my kid brother might have already been reading Groo before then - but I've never sought out his central series Usagi Yojimbo, which started in anthologies (the old-fashioned kind, single issues published on a semi-regular schedule) in the mid-80s. As I'm writing this, I looked up the details, discovering that there are thirty-eight Usagi collections to date - well, I don't know if I'll make it to the end, but let's see if I can read at least a few of them.

To make clearer my ignorance: I think the only Sakai book I've read - I have read his stuff in anthologies and collections, and works he contributed to but doesn't own, to be clear - was The Adventures of Nilson Groundthumper and Hermy, a pre-Usagi short series of stories I saw a decade ago.

So this is a thing I could have paid attention to, and maybe should, but didn't. And, nearly forty years later, I finally got to the beginning: Usagi Yojimbo, Book 1: The Ronin.

It collects eleven stories, originally published in random single issues, mostly the anthologies Albedo and Critters - all of the scattered Usagi stories from before the main series began in 1987. (This book was also published in 1987, back in the era when trade paperbacks were random and occasional rather than the expected next step of every series. That's a sign of the initial interest or importance of Usagi, I think.)

The stories are episodic, but the world and backstory is clear from the beginning - it's an anthropomorphic version of late Edo-era Japan, with different clans and groups drawn as different animals. Our hero is Miyamoto Usagi, a rabbit samurai formerly in the service of an (I think unnamed) lord who was betrayed by one of his generals at the battle of Adachigahara and died there. Usagi now wanders the country, working as a bodyguard (Yojimbo). I gather Lord Hikiji, the evil feudal leader who betrayed Usagi's master, is the major background antagonist of the series, and he shows up here, both in person and through his minions.

So this book is a mixture of early world-building - the very first story tells us the story of Adachigahara in flashback - and random wanderings, which I gather stays the pattern of the series throughout, with longer stories that seem to fall into both categories ("mythology" and "monster of the week," to use not-quite-accurate borrowed terms).

The art is crisp and clear from the beginning, though some angles (especially Usagi looking up) and some of the smaller panels of battle scenes are not as clear as I might like - these are shorter stories, that likely had page limits, and Sakai was trying to tell expansive stories from the beginning. 

I often have a quizzical reaction to anthropomorphic stories - wondering why that style was chosen, and if there are world-building hints buried in the choice of creatures - but this seems to be the old, traditional style of anthropomorphism: the creator's style aims this way, he's leaning into it, and that's all it means. The style is slightly disjoint from the bloody, mostly serious and mostly historical matter, but that doesn't seem to be meant as a source of irony: it's just the way Sakai tells stories.

These are good stories, though they seem somewhat derivative (of samurai movies, mostly) at this point in the series' history. That's not a fatal flaw - lots of things are derivative, maybe most things - but it is pretty central. On the other hand, going in any reader knows this is a long-running comic about a rabbit samurai, so all of the potential deal-breakers are right up front. The good news is that it was strong and assured from the first page: if you are interested in rabbit-samurai stories, you can start with Book 1 very easily.

Usagi Yojimbo, Book 11: Seasons by Stan Sakai

It can be easy to discount craft and consistency and clear storytelling, particularly at scale. Stan Sakai has been telling Usagi Yojimbo stories for forty years now; I've been reading them for two years, and I've only gotten through about the first decade.

(I may have been inspired to start reading this series by realizing that, after being vaguely aware of it the whole time, that the entire forty-some book series was available through my library's app. Actually, I'm not 100% sure that absolutely everything is available, but I'm now eleven books in and dozens stretch ahead of me, so it's darn close if nothing else.)

I have quibbled about some things about these Edo-period anthropomorphic-animal stories, mostly related to the fact that this is explicitly an all-ages series - and, in practice, that means that there's nothing in it that would be upsetting to a ten-year-old. It's a valid choice, and I think aligns closely with the way Sakai wants to tell stories anyway, but a vast amount of life is inherently upsetting to a ten-year-old, which means all of that is off-limits. Sex in more than the most vaguely implied sense, of course, but also a lot of the consequences of the violence that is central to a samurai epic. Usagi Yojimbo is a clean, somewhat sanitized view of a historical world, with a main character who is always true and honest and brave and on the side of right, where violence consistently solves problems and only occasionally leads to tragic ends, and where new humans appear somewhat mysteriously and relations between the sexes are either on the dynastic-connection level or a vague adolescent longing.

All that is still true of Usagi Yojimbo, Book 11: Seasons, which collects seven issues (including one originally in color; here presented in black-and-white just like the rest) and a few previously scattered stories, all from the mid-90s. It's eleven stories in total; this book was published in this format in 1999 and is still available digitally, though finding a dead-tree edition might be more difficult. (There's a newer reprint series, with fatter - but possibly smaller-format; that seems to be the way these things go - and fewer volumes, which may be easier to find.)

By this point, Sakai had a large recurring cast; two of the semi-loves of Usagi turn back up in this book, plus the inevitable roguish ronin Gen. (I didn't remember the exact detail of the two women, which were somewhat important, but the stories themselves inclue the reader enough.) Geography, though, is not a focus - Usagi does explicitly return to places in this volume that he'd been before, but those places don't get named or placed anywhere specific in Japan.

The stories are mostly miscellaneous; there's no central plot and it doesn't advance any larger overall motion of the story. (I don't think there is a central uberplot to Usagi to begin with; he has enemies and a tragic backstory but the Lone Wolf and Cub parallels don't go any further than that.) Each story is a well-told moment: a couple are vaguely sad, but mostly see Usagi setting something-or-other right or helping out someone in danger.

Sakai is a fine storyteller, with a clean line and exceptionally expressive faces. His pages are impeccably designed and his fight scenes vivid, easy to follow, and as visceral as they can be while staying ten-year-old-friendly. This is a fine series for what it is, and a lot of people would enjoy what it is.

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.

Usagi Yojimbo, Book 3: The Wanderer's Road by Stan Sakai

I don't want to predict, but I suspect this is where Usagi Yojimbo settles down into its long-term groove. The first book, The Ronin, collected the original anthology appearances, all of the shorter pieces. And then the second book, Samurai, collected the first big "mythology" story, giving more of the background.

This third book, The Wanderer's Road, came out in 1989 and collected issues 7-12 of the series - and there have been an additional thirty-six volumes since then, appearing roughly yearly.

This one has six one-shot stories, plus a jokey shorter piece from a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles jam. And, if I were a betting man, I would say that most of the following books are like this one - individual stories collected together - with maybe a quarter, maybe somewhat less, being more like Samurai, collecting larger storylines that advance the overall plot.

So here we see how Usagi gets his companion lizard Spot - and how Spot moves on to another "human" master a few issues later. (Is there a word that includes all humaniform characters in an anthropomorphic series? They're all standing in for human beings, but the fact that they're different fake-animal species always seems like it should be more important.)

We have some poignant tales, and some sillier ones. We have the return of several recurring characters, notably the blind swords-pig Ino and the roguish rhino ronin Gen. We have some eruptions of the  supernatural, including the cover story, which sees Usagi battle a samurai who either has been touched by the gods or is just insane.

It's all solid work, and the changes of tone and level of seriousness help make the book work better - Usagi Yojimbo, even this quickly, was an engine for telling many different kinds of stories. As before, the tone is generally all-ages: these are stories about people killing each other with swords that are appropriate for tweens, which I will never not find an odd choice.

And, of course, if you like one of these books, there are forty or so more (counting Space Usagi and other oddball things) to follow it up with.

Usagi Yojimbo, Book 7: Gen's Story by Stan Sakai

This one collects seven more issues of the early Usagi Yojimbo comic, plus a story from Critters, though the dates in the book are a little confusing. The book itself claims a first edition in September 1991, but says the stories included are copyright no earlier than 1992. Now, Stan Sakai is a fantastic creator, but I do think he's bound by linear time, so issues 32-38 of Usagi, which were published from February 1992 through March of 1993, could not be collected in late 1991. Given that it has a 1996 Sergio Aragones introduction, and the second edition is said to be December 1997...I'm wondering if that first edition is a typo or just a mistake inserted onto the copyright page so long ago everyone has forgotten about it.

This book is also the end of the initial Fantagraphics run of Usagi. A second edition started up - checks notes - what looks like the very same month from Mirage. That one only lasted sixteen issues, but then Dark Horse picked it up and ran for another twenty-plus years for over a hundred and fifty issues.

So I'll look to see if the beginning of the eighth volume seems to be more of an attempt to onboard new readers; this seventh volume, Gen's Story, is much like the books immediately preceding it. There's one long story that gives the book its title, this time featuring the return of the irascible rhino bounty hunter Gen, and featuring some historical backstory for him, alongside a cluster of shorter, relatively standalone stories.

We meet a female thief, Kitsune, who may be a love interest for Usagi, and then she returns in a later story. We've got a ghost story, in which Usagi is able to lay the spirit of a general he served under. We've got two shorter stories, one mostly humorous about young Usagi with his sensei and one where he's narrating an encounter with an evil witch-like character to Noriyuki, the young panda lord who has showed up in this series a few times. And there's "The Last Ino Story," in which Gen and Usagi find that blind swordspig and nurse him back to health, learning what's happened to him after their last meeting. (With about a hundred and eighty issues of later Usagi, I'm vaguely dubious anything of this era is "the last" anything, but it's possible he never shows up again.)

As always, Usagi is upstanding and righteous, closely following the code of bushido and not particularly suffering because of it - this is a lightly moralistic series for younger readers, so the character with the rigid moral framework will be correct in every situation and events will arrange themselves so that he succeeds in his endeavors. Gen in particular exists to show an alternative to Usagi - not quite villainous, but clearly Not Right, like a young man bandying a girl's name in a Wodehouse novel. The fact that this entire social setup was exploitative and corrupt, enabling a vicious caste of violence experts who were able to terrorize peasants basically at will...well, that's just the way of the samurai, isn't it?

Usasgi Yojimbo, Book 9: Daisho by Stan Sakai

As I've warned before, my posts about series tend to get shorter and more perfunctory as I have less and less to say. I may end up rambling below, but I doubt I'll have anything particularly profound this time.

I'm still reading my way through Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo series, a mildly fantasy-tinged adventure series set in a dramatically heightened version of Edo-period Japan, pitched at a level appropriate for middle-grade readers...oh, and all of the characters are anthropomorphic animals, because Sakai started this series in the '80s for the Critters anthology. Anthropomorphic characters also suit his art style quite well, though there are all the usual questions of how multi-animal worlds work - are all these races interfertile? If a rabbit and a fox have children, are they hybrids, or are the boys rabbits and the girls foxes, or what? Do the races code specific positions in society, or geographic origins, or something like that?

In this series, they're mostly just animals because Sakai wanted them to be animals. Individual characters are kinds of animals that make sense for them specifically; I haven't made a study to see how families connect. Usagi himself clearly gets the hots for babes who are not themselves rabbits, for one data-point.

The ninth collection of that series is Daisho, collecting some stories from issues 7 and 8 of the 2nd series that weren't in vol. 8 (Shades of Death) and the full issues 9-14; it reaches almost to the end of the Mirage series (Usagi started with Fantagraphics, had a short run with Mirage, and then settled in at Dark Horse for twenty years and 160-ish issues); the current edition came out in 2010 but seems to be an only very slightly updated version of the original book 9 from about 1995.

The stories here mostly flow into a continuous narrative, though those two lead-off stories are both closing off loose plot threads from earlier volumes. Most of the book sees Usagi caught up in helping out a town taken over by slavers, and then chasing their leader after "General Fujii" steals Usagi's swords. After that, we get a flashback to another great lost love of Usagi's life - we're only up to Lost Love #2 at this point, but we're also only twenty-some issues in, with a hundred and sixty to go, so Usagi could have a hot anthropomorphic babe in every town by the end of the series if I'm counting correctly.

This particular Lost Love is the We Could Never Be Together type - she's the daughter of a major lord, he's the bodyguard delivering her to the arranged marriage, and they're on the run from the forces trying to murder her before that can happen. You've read that story before, but Sakai does a solid version of it here.

That's generally my take on Usagi, this volume and this previous ones - Sakai is professional and solid, telling stories well in a clean style, with solid dialogue and engaging plotting. There's nothing groundbreaking or surprising here, and it is all pitched so you could hand it to a ten-year-old. Is that enough? Every reader has to decide that - so far, I'm enjoying the stories, while finding them inherently limited.

Book-A-Day 2014 #174: The Adventures of Nilson Groundthumpher and Hermy by Stan Sakai

It's not uncommon for a creator's most popular character -- or book, or painting, or whatever -- to have clear precursors, since artists usually have a continuity of interests. But they're only occasionally really, really blatant -- though those can be the most interesting cases.

Stan Sakai is most famous for his samurai rabbit, Usagi Yojimbo. He's written and drawn about thirty books of Usagi's adventures (depending on how you count art books and Space Usagi) over the past thirty years. But Sakai created the adventures of a different rabbit with a sword first -- and, in his introduction to this book, he explains how Usagi was originally going to be an important secondary character in a very long graphic story, but that the samurai took over his ideas quickly and sent him in a different direction.

So, finally, The Adventures of Nilson Groundthumper and Hermy has been collected -- the first few fragments of what Sakai originally expected would fill 2500 pages, plus some later stories done after he'd already shifted gears and given most of his serious attention to Usagi. Sakai's original conception, as he describes it, bears a very clear debt to Dave Sim's Cerebus, though Sakai never mentions that. This book has about a hundred pages of stories about an adventuring rabbit and his sidekick (as required: lovable, loyal, honest to a fault, and more than a little dimwitted), in a cod-medieval world full of anthropomorphic animals. They read a lot like Sakai's version of those first dozen or so Cerebus issues, taking standard fantasy-novel tropes  (mostly from Conan, and probably mostly via Conan comics and secondarily via Groo) and translating them into comics. Nilson and Hermy run into wizards and witches, kings and thieves, lurking monsters and lost cities -- all of the expected trappings of adventure in the early '80s. Each story basically stands alone, though the nasty wizard does return a couple of times.

This is minor work, of course, but it's a cute little package of amusing fantasy stories -- suitable for readers of nearly any age. Sakai's serious fans will probably find the most to enjoy here, with a Sakai rabbit hero probably previously unknown to them

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 9/19

This was one of those weeks dominated by a single big box -- in this case from Dark Horse -- so I'll talk about the other things first and then dive into that. But, first: the explanation! I review books, so I get books to review -- sometimes things I ask for, sometimes not, and always more than I'll be able to manage to read. I do these Monday-morning posts to make sure that I mention everything -- the books I know I'll love, the books I'll read five pages of and quietly drop, the ones that will fall deeper and deeper into a pile until they're finally eaten by a grue.

First this week is a book with the cheery title It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Zombies!, a collection of Christmas carols written by Michael P. Spradlin with an introduction by Christopher Moore. It also has a number of cheery illustrations by Jeff Weigel, full of rotting flesh and juicy brains. It's one of those cute little impulse buys that I expect will sit at the cash-wrap in various bookstores starting in November, when it will be published by Harper. (Given that Spradlin is, by day, a Harper sales rep who lives in Michigan, I hope one particular chain will be particularly enthusiastic about it.)

The fifth and last of the Joe Pitt Casebooks series from Charlie Huston -- about vampires in New York, who act very much like real-life organized criminals and gangs -- is My Dead Body, coming as a trade paperback from Del Rey on October 13th. (I reviewed one of the earlier books, No Dominion, last year, and keep thinking that I need to find time to read the rest of the series. Maybe I will now that it's complete.)

I mentioned Douglas Clegg's new novella-as-a-book Isis when I saw a copy at BEA this summer; it's now turned into a real hardcover (slim and handsome, just a bit too late for a Fashion Week tie-in) from Vanguard Press. It's illustrated, in a great spidery, neo-19th century style, by Glenn Chadbourne, and it will be officially published in October.

I've complained before about graphic novels from major publishers that downplay the work of the artist -- usually with a credit like "illustrated by" or "artwork by," even in cases where that artist was working from a vague script without even panel breakdowns. But I now have an even worse case -- The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks is credited only to Max Brooks on the front cover and title page. The artist, Ibraim Roberson, is merely mentioned on the bottom of the back cover and with a small reference on the copyright page. Three Rivers Press, this is simply unacceptable. A graphic novel is not a work by one writer, and it's stupid to pretend that it is. From that copyright page, it also looks like Recorded Attacks collects comics stories originally published by Avatar, but it doesn't make that connection clear at all. What Recorded Attacks does have, once the reader can figure it out, is a dozen comics stories of between five and twenty pages, all drawn by Roberson and written by Brooks, about attacks by zombies at various points in history. If you like reading about random historical people being eaten by supernatural creatures -- and seeing that depicted in an appropriately detailed, gory style -- Recorded Attacks will be available on October 6th.

And now I get into the Dark Horse box -- everything from here on out is published by Dark Horse, and is available now.

Next is Usagi Yojimbo: Bridge Of Tears, the twenty-third collection of the long-running series by Stan Sakai. I've only looked at Usagi intermittently, but even I know that it's about an anthropomorphic (rabbit) samurai in classical Japan, wandering and having the kind of adventures that honorable ronin have, among a series of other characters who look more individual and less "furry" than is usual for anthropomorphic comics. And now that I have this book in my hands, I guess I should read it and do a more serious review of Usagi.

Indiana Jones Omnibus: The Further Adventures Volume 2 collects the early '80s series from Marvel comics -- remember when big comics companies could have long-running, popular series in the first place, and they're weren't necessarily all long-underwear types? Ah, good times -- written by David Michelinie, with art from a variety of folks like Herbe Trimpe, Jackson Guice, Luke McDonnell, David Mazzucchelli, and even Steve Ditko. This book collects issues 13-24 of the Further Adventures of Indiana Jones series, plus the three-issue adaptation of the movie Temple of Doom, which interrupted it. It looks like typical '80s Marvel adventure comics -- wordy, with occasionally shaky continuity on character's faces, but full of action and forward momentum.

And then there's Kull: The Shadow Kingdom, a graphic novel adapted from Robert E. Howard's story of the same name by Arvid Nelson, with art by Will Conrad and Jose Villarrubia. Dark Horse is doing a lot of Howard-related books recently -- there's their long-standing Conan series, both new work and reprints of the old Marvel stuff, plus this and a Solomon Kane book coming up -- and I thought I'd try to do a big Howard-at-DH review this fall. Now that I've actually said that in public, I hope it will happen.

Speaking of Howard and Dark Horse, I was surprised to see that their reprints of the old long-running Marvel series has hit Volume 18: Isle of the Dead. (I own the first five, but stopped following it closely after that, since I was primarily interested in the Windsor-Smith era.) This one has stories from 1982 and 1983, written by Bruce Jones and Steven Grant, with art from John Buscema (who did Conan, off and on, for a very long time, I note once again), Marc Silvestri, Val Mayerik, Alfredo Alcala, and others.

Speaking of Conan stories from Marvel in the early '80s, Dark Horse also recently published The Savage Sword Of Conan Volume 6, which collects all of the 1981 issues of that Marvel black-and-white magazine in one of those phone-book-looking collections that everyone seems to have forgotten Dave Sim invented. Savage Sword was the older brother of the Marvel Conan comics series, aimed at a somewhat older audience, with more graphic violence, no Comics Code, and even a few hints of sex. These stories are by Roy Thomas, Michael Fleisher, and Bruce Jones, with, again, most of the art by the hard-working John Buscema. Gil Kane shows up for one issues, and Ernie Chan inks Buscema most of the time, and does one issue solo.

And last for this week is Turok, Son of Stone Archives, Volume 2, collecting the second six-pack of the Dell comics series from the '50s. This was well before my time, and it looks a bit crude these days -- particularly in the bland typeset lettering -- but I'm sure there will always be an audience for stories about Indians fighting dinosaurs. At least, I wouldn't want to live in a world where no one cared about Indians fighting dinosaurs!
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Listening to: Rupa & the April Fishes - Une Américaine à Paris
via FoxyTunes

Books Read: February 2024

Here I am again: this is what I read last month. Links will follow as always.

Mike Mignola and Warwick Johnson-Cadwell, Falconspeare (2/3, digital)

Tessa Hulls, Feeding Ghosts (2/4, digital)

Po Bronson, The Nudist on the Late Shift (2/4)

Osamu Tezuka, One Hundred Tales (2/10, digital)

Zerocalcare, Forget My Name (2/11, digital)

James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice (2/11, in Library of America Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 40s)

Stan Sakai, Usagi Yojimbo, Book 1: The Ronin (2/17, digital)

P. Craig Russell, The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde, Vol. 1: The Selfish Giant / The Star Child (2/18, digital)

P.G. Wodehouse, The Adventures of Sally (2/18)

Kristen Gudsnuk, Making Friends: Together Forever (2/19, digital)

Elizabeth Pich, Fungirl: You Are Revolting (2/24 digital)

Jeffrey Ford, Out of Body (2/24)

Bryan Lee O'Malley, Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life (2/25, digital)

Grant Snider, The Art of Living (2/26, digital)

Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (2/26)

Next month will see more of the same, as long as I have any say in the matter.

Books Read: July 2026

I'm slightly back-dating this; I'm writing in the late morning of August 2, and setting the post-time to be a few hours ago, mostly for tidiness reasons. (I don't remember why I set posts for 8:30 AM in my time zone, but, by Gum! it's my standard and a man has got to have standards.)

Here's what I read this past month:

Ana Oncina, Planeta (digital, 7/3)

Kristen Radtke, Seek You (7/4)

Gene Wolfe, Interlibrary Loan (7/4)

Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 10: Hostage Child (digital, 7/5)

Raina Telgemeier and Scott McCloud, The Cartoonists Club (digital, 7/6)

P.G. Wodehouse, Much Obliged, Jeeves (7/6)

Kim Deitch, How I Make Comics (7/7)

Guy Delisle, Muybridge (7/8)

Ross Macdonald, The Moving Target (7/8)

John Porcellino, Perfect Example (7/9)

Gilbert Hernandez, Proof That the Devil Loves You (7/10)

John Cuneo's Good Intentions (7/11)

Shinji Kaijo and Kenji Tsuruta, Emanon, Vol. 1 (digital, 7/12)

Martha Wells, Witch King (7/12)

Mike Dawson, The Hidden Dominion of Geordie James (7/18)

David Small, The Werewolf at Dusk and Other Stories (7/19)

Joe Sacco, The Once and Future Riot (7/25)

Stan Sakai, Usagi Yojimbo Book 11: Seasons (digital, 7/26)

Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart, and Jack Cohen, The Science of Discworld III: Darwin's Watch (7/28)

Next month I'll be back with another one of these.

Books Read: April 2026

I am finding it increasingly difficult to believe my calendar. April 2026 just ended? Surely that's a science-fictional year, yes? Whatever month or year it actually is - the empire never ended - here's what I read over the past thirty-one days. I will add links later, once my posts actually go live.

Kenji Tsurata, Captain Momo's Secret Base, Vol. 1 (digital, 4/3)

Mike Mignola and Dave Stewart, Uri Tupka and the Gods (digital, 4/4)

Loïc Clément and Anne Montelk, Days of Sugar and Spice (digital, 4/5)

Stan Sakai, Usagi Yojimbo Book 10: The Brink of Life and Death (digital, 4/11)

Mark Twain, Roughing It (in Library of American omnibus with The Innocents Abroad, 4/11)

Pierre-Henry Gomont, Brain Drain, Part 1 (digital, 4/12)

Raymond Chandler, Playback (in Later Novels & Other Writings, 4/15

Philippe Riche, The Alliance of the Curious, #2: Neandertalensis (digital, 4/17)

Ben Sears, Young Shadow and the Watchdogs (digital, 4/18)

Jordan Crane, Goes Like This (digital, 4/19)

Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre (4/19)

Alexandro Jodorowsky & Mœbius, The Incal, Vol. 4: What Is Above (digital, 4/25)

Hope Larson, Be That Way (4/25)

Lauren Haldeman, Wild That We're Alive (digital, 4/26)

I will read more books in May (May?!). Pretty sure of that, at least.

Books Read: August 2025

This is what I read last month; as always, it's mostly an index to the blog and primarily useful to me  rather than you the home viewer. But there it is:

Richard Sala, Night Drive (digital, 8/2)

Ruth Goodman, How to Be a Victorian (8/2)

Doug Savage, Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy (digital, 8/3)

Mark Chiarello, editor, Wednesday Comics (8/9)

William Goldman, The Princess Bride (8/9)

René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo, Asterix the Gladiator (8/10)

Sophie Goldstein, House of Women (digital, 8/16)

Jack Vance, Trullion: Alastor 2262 (in Alastor, 8/16)

Sergio Aragones' Groo: The Hogs of Horder (digital, 8/17)

Jeff Lemire, 10,000 Ink Stains: A Memoir (digital, 8/23)

Various, The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Amazing Colossal Episode Guide (8/23)

Peter Bagge and Gilbert Hernandez, Yeah! (digital, 8/24)

Ambrose Bierce, In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (in The Devil's Dictionary, Tales & Memoirs, 8/24)

Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima, Lone Wolf & Cub, Vol. 7: Cloud Dragom, Wind Tiger (digital. 8/25)

Carol Lay, Murderburg (digital, 8/26)

Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (in Prose and Poetry, 8/26)

Stan Sakai, Usagi Yojimbo, Book 8: Shades of Death (digital, 8/27)

P.G., Wodehouse, The Small Bachelor (8/27)

Kenji Tsuruta, Wandering Island, Vol. 1 (digital, 8/28)

Philippe Riche, Bad Break, Chapter #2 (digital, 8/29)

Loren D. Estleman, The Left-Handed Dollar (8/29)

Michael Sweater, Everything Sucks: Kings of Nothing (digital, 8/30)

Denis-Pierre Filippi & Silvio Camboni, Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse and the Amazing Lost Ocean (digital, 8/31)

Dashiell Hammett, The Glass Key (in Complete Novels, 8/31)

I plan to keep reading books in the future.

Books Read: September 2024

Here I am again, with a list of what I read last month. This post is mostly an index, and only becomes useful later, when I add links after the posts go live. But here it is, in its corruptible, mortal state.

Stan Sakai, Usagi Yojimbo, Book 4: The Dragon Bellow Conspiracy (digital, 9/1)

John Hodgman, Vacationland (9/1)

Matt Kindt, Spy Superb (digital, 9/2)

Matt Haig, The Midnight Library (9/2)

Michele Botton and Dorilys Giacchetto, Audrey Hepburn (digital, 9/7)

Jean-Claude Forest, Barbarella, Book 2: The Wrath of the Minute-Eater (digital, 9/8)

Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond (9/9)

Yves Challand, Freddy Lombard, Vol.1: The Will of Godfrey of Bouillon (digital, 9/14)

Patrick McDonnell, The Super Hero's Journey (digital, 9/15)

Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman (in The Complete Novels, 9/15)

Box Brown, Is This Guy For Real? (9/21)

Mikhail Bulgakov, Andrej Klimowski, and Danusia Schejbal, The Master and Margarita: A Graphic Novel (9/22)

Jonathan Carroll, Sleeping in Flame (9/22)

Van Jensen and Nate Powell, Two Dead (9/27)

Tim Bird, Adrift on a Painted Sea (digital, 9/28)

P. Craig Russell, The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde, Vol.4: The Devoted Friend/The Nightingale and the Rose (digital, 9/29)

Mary Roach, Animal Vegetable Criminal (9/29)

In October, I expect to read more books. Keep tuned to this station for the latest updates.

Books Read: February 2025

This is basically an index, and it's mostly for my benefit, which is why I bury it on a weekend and usually post it dated in the past. Links will be added once the posts go live; I'm running about 6 weeks ahead at the moment, which is where I like to be.

This is what I read in February:

Axelle Lenoir, What If We Were.... (2/2, digital)

Lucy Knisley, Woe: A Housecat's Story of Despair (2/8)

Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely (2/8, in Stories and Early Novels)

Derek Evernden, Bogart Creek, Vol. 2 (2/9, digital)

P.G. Wodehouse, A Prefect's Uncle (2/9)

Vivek J. Tiwary and Andrew C. Robinson, The Fifth Beatle (2/15, digital)

Kris Wilson, Rob Den Blyker, and Dave McElfatrick, Cyanide and Happiness: Twenty Years Wasted (2/16, digital)

Stan Sakai, Usagi Yojimbo, Book 6: Circles (2/17, digital)

Tim Powers, My Brother's Keeper (2/17)

Zach M. Stafford, Good Comics for Bad People (2/22, digital)

Daniel Pinkwater, Jules, Penny, and the Rooster (2/22, bound galleys)

Cathy Malkasian, Percy Gloom (2/23, digital)

Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli, Batman: Year One (2/24, digital)

In March, I have continued to read books.

Books Read: April 2024

I'm doing this post almost two months late, since I forgot it, and burying it on the weekend I should have done it in the first place. If this pops up in your RSS reader and confuses you, well, I do apologize.

Jillian and Mariko Tamaki, Roaming (4/6)

Lavie Tidhar, The Circumference of the World (ARC, 4/6)

Kazu Kibuishi, Amulet, Book Nine: Waverider (4/7)

Haruki Murakami, Murakami T: The Shirts I Love (4/7)

Faith Erin Hicks, The Divided Earth (4/13)

Gene Luen Yang and LeUyen Pham, Lunar New Year Love Story (4/14)

Jack Vance, The Killing Machine (in The Demon Princes, Vol. 1, 4/14)

Salva Rubio and Efa, Degas and Cassatt: A Solitary Dance (digital, 4/19)

Stan Sakai, Usagi Yojimbo, Book 2: Samurai (digital, 4/20)

Gene Wolfe, The Fifth Head of Cerberus (4/20)

Leela Corman, Victory Parade (digital, 4/21)

Nick Bantock, The Corset and the Jellyfish (4/21)

FLuX and David Good, Good. (digital, 4/27)

Horace McCoy, They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (in Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 40s, 4/27)

P. Craig Russell, The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde, Vol. 2: The Young King & The Remarkable Rocket (digital, 4/28)

P.G. Wodehouse, The Pothunters (4/28)

Next month....well, I just typed up the list for next month, so, yes, you will also find it on this here blog.