Manga Monday: Halfway Through A Legendary Journey

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Manga Monday: Halfway Through A Legendary Journey

09/29/2014 4:23pm

Vol. 6 of the Lone Wolf and Cub Omnibus hits stores this week. The bare facts begin with it being 700 pages for $19.99—tremendous value for the reader. Six volumes times 700 pages is 4200 pages—and that’s only the halfway point of the story. But if you feel intimidated to even start this series, here’s another fact: Lone Wolf and Cub isn’t just Dark Horse’s best-selling manga; with over 1.3 million copies in print, it’s our best-selling title, ever, period.

Dark Horse releases a tremendous variety of books. Some are just books of their time, and some will only appeal to certain readers. But at Dark Horse we’re inspired by the history of comics worldwide, and we’re driven to publish, whenever we can, those classic works that have stood the test of decades. Lone Wolf and Cub represents the reasons Dark Horse wanted to release manga in the first place. In fact, our publisher, Mike Richardson, was fascinated by Lone Wolf and Cub long before there even was a Dark Horse, discovering the manga in the early 1970s when a copy of the Japanese magazine it originally ran in made its way to a used book store in Portland.

As many of you know, Lone Wolf and Cub is the story of Itto Ogami, samurai and former court executioner to the Tokugawa shogun. Framed by his enemies and ordered to commit the gruesome ritual suicide of seppuku, he instead escapes and takes his little son, Daigoro, with him. Roaming the byways of Japan as “Lone Wolf and Cub,” he becomes an assassin killing for 500 pieces of gold, as he tries to gradually untangle the conspiracy that put him on the run. Vol. 6 of the omnibus ends on a dramatic moment in the plot, as Itto and Daigoro are drawn into a trap by his arch-enemy Retsudo, lord of the scheming Yagyu clan. Yet with a dozen blades pointed at him, Ogami has a secret more deadly even than his sword…

But Lone Wolf and Cub didn’t earn its epic status only through the twists and turns of its plot; it’s a story not just of its main characters, but of the many people they meet along the way, whose lives feel just as real. As with some of the best historical fiction, Lone Wolf and Cub is a rich exercise in world-building—not of an imaginary world, but through the rediscovery of a past that seems a realm of fantasy now, yet once lived and breathed.

[please insert image Lone Wolf Omnibus 6 interior here]

Here’s a single page out of that 700 that unites the storytelling of writer Kazuo Koike and artist Goseki Kojima. A cheerful, old-fashioned carp kite flutters in the foreground. No one below notices; no one but we, the readers, can see how the kite makes the men marching down the dusty street below into an ominous river flowing forward. Koike’s brief note in the bottom right tells us who they’re coming for—the underground Japanese Christians who managed to survive through centuries of persecution. Koike and Kojima sketch their story vividly in just one chapter out of the dozens in Lone Wolf and Cub, and then keep moving on, as they must. If you haven’t started reading yet, you too have many such encounters ahead, within one of the greatest manga series of all time.

—Carl Horn

Manga Editor

Dark Horse releases a tremendous variety of books. Some are just books of their time, and some will only appeal to certain readers. But at Dark Horse we’re inspired by the history of comics worldwide, and we’re driven to publish, whenever we can, those classic works that have stood the test of decades. Lone Wolf and Cub represents the reasons Dark Horse wanted to release manga in the first place. In fact, our publisher, Mike Richardson, was fascinated by Lone Wolf and Cub long before there even was a Dark Horse, discovering the manga in the early 1970s when a copy of the Japanese magazine it originally ran in made its way to a used book store in Portland.

As many of you know, Lone Wolf and Cub is the story of Itto Ogami, samurai and former court executioner to the Tokugawa shogun. Framed by his enemies and ordered to commit the gruesome ritual suicide of seppuku, he instead escapes and takes his little son, Daigoro, with him. Roaming the byways of Japan as “Lone Wolf and Cub,” he becomes an assassin killing for 500 pieces of gold, as he tries to gradually untangle the conspiracy that put him on the run. Vol. 6 of the omnibus ends on a dramatic moment in the plot, as Itto and Daigoro are drawn into a trap by his arch-enemy Retsudo, lord of the scheming Yagyu clan. Yet with a dozen blades pointed at him, Ogami has a secret more deadly even than his sword…

But Lone Wolf and Cub didn’t earn its epic status only through the twists and turns of its plot; it’s a story not just of its main characters, but of the many people they meet along the way, whose lives feel just as real. As with some of the best historical fiction, Lone Wolf and Cub is a rich exercise in world-building—not of an imaginary world, but through the rediscovery of a past that seems a realm of fantasy now, yet once lived and breathed.

Here’s a single page out of that 700 that unites the storytelling of writer Kazuo Koike and artist Goseki Kojima. A cheerful, old-fashioned carp kite flutters in the foreground. No one below notices; no one but we, the readers, can see how the kite makes the men marching down the dusty street below into an ominous river flowing forward. Koike’s brief note in the bottom right tells us who they’re coming for—the underground Japanese Christians who managed to survive through centuries of persecution. Koike and Kojima sketch their story vividly in just one chapter out of the dozens in Lone Wolf and Cub, and then keep moving on, as they must. If you haven’t started reading yet, you too have many such encounters ahead, within one of the greatest manga series of all time.

—Carl Horn

Manga Editor

Dark Horse Comics

Manga Monday: Halfway Through A Legendary Journey

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Manga Monday: Halfway Through A Legendary Journey

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