context: comics > Some works

Lone Wolf & Cub

This is among my favourite comics of all time, from any country. It's a very long and intense samurai story by writer Kazuo Koike and artist Goseki Kojima. Itto Ogami has all his family murdered, and goes on the road with his infant son as an assassin for hire to build up the resources for his revenge against the Yagyu clan and its ninjas. The story runs to around 8,500 pages, much of which is made up of standalone episodes, but the continuing overarching story occupies a good part of it - and all of the last several books (of 28 in total). Koike is an intelligent writer who does the work to understand the period, the religious ideas, the mindset, but especially to create very solid and strong characters, and Kojima is a spectacularly exciting and powerful artist, with brushwork second to none. The tone of the series is very like Kurosawa's samurai movies. It's been an influential series: adapted into a TV series and half a dozen movies (you can easily find a film called Shogun Assassin badly compiled from some of them); a major influence on American comic writer-artist Frank Miller; and it was an important part of making samurai stories an adult genre in Japan.

Note: it's also well worth seeking out the "golden duo"'s comparable 10-book Samurai Executioner series (both are available in English in excellent value books)(and here is me on volume 6 of the series on another site). There is much more Koike translated, but sadly not yet any of Kojima's late stories based on Kurosawa's movies.

Most recently, there is another series entitled Path Of The Assassin, a particularly strong and well-researched story about early days of the great Ieyasu Tokugawa, the man who launched the Japan's longest and most solid period of consistent and peaceful rule from the start of the 17th Century. Don't let the educational content mislead you: this is just as exciting as the samurai stories, and not very different in feel.

More on one LW&C story

backwards: Barefoot Gen

forwards: Rose of Versailles