Manga Monday: Blade of the Immortal Volume 31: Final Curtain

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Manga Monday: Blade of the Immortal Volume 31: Final Curtain

03/23/2015 1:17pm

Blade of the Immortal—one of Dark Horse Manga’s oldest series—ends its influential run on April 1 with Volume 31: Final Curtain. Our final volume is dedicated to former Dark Horse partner, Studio Proteus founder, and manga pioneer Toren Smith, who passed away in March 2013.

Toren wrote the following short piece for Blade of the Immortal #131, the last monthly English-language comic published in November 2007, when Dark Horse was publishing a monthly series and trade collections. Here are Toren’s thoughts on discovering Hiroaki Samura’s series and bringing it to Dark Horse Manga and English-reading fans . . .

The first time I cracked open an issue of Afternoon and saw Blade of the Immortal, I knew we had to publish it over here. Samura was a weak comics artist at the time, but his drawing skill was mind-blowing. Having seen how quickly an artist can grow with a diet of regular work (being around Adam Warren gave me a personal experience), I knew he’d settle in and get very, very good indeed.

But there was a catch. Speaking to Samura, he was dubious about flopping his art. Since this was back in the “Dark Ages,” when retailers and distributors were wary of unflopped manga, we didn’t have much choice. Still, initially he refused. Later, after the first tankobon had come out, I sat down with it and partway through made a realization. As his layout and storytelling skills had matured, he had moved to an unusual style—almost all of his panels were rectangular. For an idea of how odd this is, grab any manga off your shelf and compare. I made a few photocopies of his pages and pasted them up with the panels unreversed, but the order of the panels reversed. It worked. Studio Proteus put together a sequence of about ten pages and sent them off to Samura, and he was intrigued. While he had done some work early on Blade that was not amenable to this technique, he suggested that he’d redraw a few panels here and there as needed. I knew we could trim bleeds and—if I kept sharp while doing the rewrite—I could move the readers along correctly with strategic repositioning of the word balloons and tweaking the dialogue. Except for a few cases where I got brain fade and screwed up, I think it worked pretty well. Hey, it’s tough to read each panel knowing it will be unflopped . . . and yet reordered on the page! For the first couple volumes I actually cut and pasted each page, but eventually I was able to do it in my head, on the fly. All of my mistakes were corrected in the trade collections, and after Tomoko came on board there were essentially none, since she kept an eagle eye on this.

Blade has its ups and downs, but overall it’s one of the best series I ever worked on. Samura really is a genius, and his artwork has gotten better and better. His ability to control a tone using just a pencil is almost superhuman, as you can see from his pinups and illustration-style art. The vast cast of characters was really fun to work with and his strong sense of character made translation and rewriting a pleasure. (If I had to choose a favorite character, it would be Hyakurin.)

I’ve been blessed to work on some very fine manga indeed, but I have to put Blade of the Immortal in my top ten. It was hard to move off the series when I did, but at the time I really had no choice. Fortunately, it’s chugged along just fine without me. Having top talent like Tomoko Saito and Dana Lewis working on it pretty much guaranteed the end result would be superb, and it has been. Thanks to all the editors, designers, and others who have worked on Blade: they’ve all done a great job.

—Toren Smith, September 2007

The first time I cracked open an issue of Afternoon and saw Blade of the Immortal, I knew we had to publish it over here. Samura was a weak comics artist at the time, but his drawing skill was mind-blowing. Having seen how quickly an artist can grow with a diet of regular work (being around Adam Warren gave me a personal experience), I knew he’d settle in and get very, very good indeed.

But there was a catch. Speaking to Samura, he was dubious about flopping his art. Since this was back in the “Dark Ages,” when retailers and distributors were wary of unflopped manga, we didn’t have much choice. Still, initially he refused. Later, after the first tankobon had come out, I sat down with it and partway through made a realization. As his layout and storytelling skills had matured, he had moved to an unusual style—almost all of his panels were rectangular. For an idea of how odd this is, grab any manga off your shelf and compare. I made a few photocopies of his pages and pasted them up with the panels unreversed, but the order of the panels reversed. It worked. Studio Proteus put together a sequence of about ten pages and sent them off to Samura, and he was intrigued. While he had done some work early on Blade that was not amenable to this technique, he suggested that he’d redraw a few panels here and there as needed. I knew we could trim bleeds and—if I kept sharp while doing the rewrite—I could move the readers along correctly with strategic repositioning of the word balloons and tweaking the dialogue. Except for a few cases where I got brain fade and screwed up, I think it worked pretty well. Hey, it’s tough to read each panel knowing it will be unflopped . . . and yet reordered on the page! For the first couple volumes I actually cut and pasted each page, but eventually I was able to do it in my head, on the fly. All of my mistakes were corrected in the trade collections, and after Tomoko came on board there were essentially none, since she kept an eagle eye on this.

Blade has its ups and downs, but overall it’s one of the best series I ever worked on. Samura really is a genius, and his artwork has gotten better and better. His ability to control a tone using just a pencil is almost superhuman, as you can see from his pinups and illustration-style art. The vast cast of characters was really fun to work with and his strong sense of character made translation and rewriting a pleasure. (If I had to choose a favorite character, it would be Hyakurin.)

I’ve been blessed to work on some very fine manga indeed, but I have to put Blade of the Immortal in my top ten. It was hard to move off the series when I did, but at the time I really had no choice. Fortunately, it’s chugged along just fine without me. Having top talent like Tomoko Saito and Dana Lewis working on it pretty much guaranteed the end result would be superb, and it has been. Thanks to all the editors, designers, and others who have worked on Blade: they’ve all done a great job.

—Toren Smith, September 2007

Blade of the Immortal Volume 31: Final Curtain is on sale April 1st! Check out free preview pages here!

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Manga Monday: Blade of the Immortal Volume 31: Final Curtain

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Manga Monday: Blade of the Immortal Volume 31: Final Curtain

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