World Famous Comics: Demon Mask (Usagi Yojimbo, book 14)
Demon Mask (Usagi Yojimbo, book 14)
By: Stan Sakai Publisher: Dark Horse Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: Dark Horse Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 224 Publication Date: May 08, 2001 Reading Level: Ages 9-12 Release Date: May 08, 2001
Product Description: The close of 16th century Japan was a violent age, as rival feudal lords fought for land and power. Miyamoto Usagi braved many a battle only to lose his lord and find himself a masterless samurai, or ronin. While many ronin became bandits or mercenaries, Usagi chose the warrior pilgrimage: wandering the land, fighting injustice, seeking enlightenment. Eisner Award winner Stan Sakai has crafted a truly original and delightful work, an all-ages adventure epic that creates a world of excitement, mystery, and imagination, while building each story on painstaking research of Japan's history, culture, and mythology. Demon Mask is a collection of diverse Usagi stories, featuring a graveyard encounter with creatures from Japanese folktales, a whodunit clash with a mysterious masked assassin, a young adventure-lover insistent on receiving Usagi's sword training, a peasant village terrorized by a ravaging Spider Woman, and more. Few works of graphic fiction offer -- or deliver -- as much action, depth, and sheer fun as Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo.
Kitsune enters, Gen darkens, Ino exits Usagi Yojimbo is the kind of quality work that transcends time, genres, demographics, and even age groups. It crafts a delicate and beautiful balance between honor and savagery, cute innocence and dark brutality, simple heart-warming stories and multi-part epics that shape a dense continuity. Whether or not you've ever been a fan of feudal Japanese culture, furry anthro characters, or independent, non-superhero comics, Usagi Yojimbo is a comic that can't help but impress even the harshest critic.
Volume 7 can be best summarized as an installment in which secondary characters undergo transitions. Kitsune, the memorable trickster who does what she can to get by, makes her first and second appearances. Gen finally receives a back story and development, though it reveals that what he keeps beneath the surface is quite a bit darker and more troubled than one might have expected. And, finally, Zato Ino (The Blind Swordspig) makes his unforgettable exit, never to return to the comic book page. Add in a few charming one shots including one starring young Usagi (I adore those stories) and a touching ghost story about a dead general who needs Usagi's help to attain his rest, and you've got a recipe for one intriguing volume.
I don't consider this to be one of Sakai's strongest installments, but it certainly does offer a rich variety of characterization and entertainment. For Ino's exit alone, It's absolutely worth checking out.
Awesome Stan Sakai is a modern master. i have read all the Usagi yojimbo books and this one is a great starting point for anyone and lets us know a little more about the bounty hunter Gen. This is really the beginning of Stan's long journey for establishing a continuity with Usagi and comes highly recommended. Not a funny animal book but humour and adventure is always present.
Great satifying read It's hard to review "Usagi Yojimbo" books, which is why I've never done one before, even though I've read nearly all of the series. It's just because Stan Sakai produces some of the most consistently entertaining and satisfying reads in the comic book marketplace. So you can rave about one book, and in essence, rave about all.
Which isn't to say that no one book stands out. They do, for different reasons. But there is such a deceptively simple and straightforward quality to this series, that at some point, a reader just takes for granted that you're getting something good, because you always do.
For those unfamiliar, Myamoto Usagi is a masterless samurai, a ronin, who travels feudal Japan seeking adventure. And he's an anthropomorphic rabbit. Indeed, every character is a "funny" animal. But don't let that put you off. The funny animals are just a means of making the series more distinct. Sakai's stories are still very basic and recognizable stories of human beings living, and dying, in a precarious and decadent time and place.
The stories found in volume 7 are perfect examples of Sakai's gift. The centerpiece is "Gen", in which Sakai finally reveals the tragic origins of Usagi's fellow ronin and (mostly) friend, Gen (a rhino). Gen has been (and continues to be) a skilled fighter, who never let's anything stand between him and his pay-off. But when the two samurai have a chance encounter with a dishonored lady bent on revenge, we finally learn how Gen came to be such a great fighter and why he's taken such a cynical view of the world. The story proves touching and tragic, and makes Gen more sympathetic in the reader's eyes.
Other stories include "Kitsune", introducing a young (cat)woman who's street peformances aid her primary source of income: theft. Kitsune has appeared in subsequent volumes, sharing and amusing and frustrating relationship with Usagi. In her second story, "The Return of Kistune", Kistune inadvertently uses her fast fingers to obtain a letter incriminating the local magistrate. Naturally, the chase in on, and Usagi comes to her rescue.
There is a touch of the supernatural involved in these stories as well, as Usagi encounters vengeful ghosts in his childhood, battles a cannibal demon eating samurai on the run, and helps a ghost to his final rest.
This book provides a pretty good sample of your average Usgai volume. While you don't need to read them in order to appreciate them (I didn't) it does underline the bigger picture that Sakai is painting to do so. They're all back in print, so go get them.
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