"I'll make you a deal. How about I kill a thousand bad guys? Then you get rid of the worms?"

The ronin (Samurai without a master) Manji suffers from the worst kind of curse.

Immortality.

Infected by the legendary bloodworm, Manji's wounds, no matter how serious, heal within minutes, the worms giving their lives to stitch his body back together after every sword strike, every deadly axe slash. Disgusted by his immortality which he sees as a curse instead of a gift, he makes a deal with Yaobikuni (a 900 year old woman) to release him after he's killed a thousand villains to make up for his sins.

Hiraoki Samura's Japanese comic book Blade of the Immortal takes the story of the samurai and turns it on its head. Mixing harsh realities of human emotions and reactions to the violent Edo Era of Japan with mystical bloodworms and extremely poetic visions of swordplay. Samura's stylized artwork melds traditional (albeit wonderfully rough) pen and ink, gray-toned artwork with beautiful pencil renderings for a very interesting and original conceptual effect. The battles are filled with an intense energy as the swords blur and scratch the streets and walls of buildings, the speed lines crafted with deft, quick strokes, each very loose but perfectly placed. But it is in the amazing pencilled pages that Samura shows the genius of his technique. He tends to freeze the frame during a battle, one captured moment in time, usually the final stroke of the sword, rendered just in pencil, like poetry in motion, framed with an intricate Japanese design and motion the likes of which you've never seen before. It's dark. It's beautiful. It's highly intense.

But artwork has never been enough to make a comic book really stand out. The story is just as important and Samura proves his genius by weaving a highly stylized tale of a lone ronin searching for salvation in a sort of modernized Edo period. His dialogue is fascinating, mixing modern colloquialisms into the historical culture and he uses it to build a convincing story set in a fictional mythology. Mixed within spectacularly intense duels and all out brawls are very calm and deeply philosophical explorations into the psyches of Manji, his charge Rin, and even the enemy school of the Itto-Ryu. The enemies are complex, evil yet honorable (some of them) at times, with their own philosophies about the life of a samurai and you will find yourself relating to their integrity, if not their actions. Even Rin who has hired Manji as a fighter and bodyguard to take revenge on the Itto-Ryu after her father was killed and mother raped by the renegade sword school.

It's a dark story, to be sure, not without humor, but consisting mostly of deep, psychological battles without and within and ultra-violence and gruesome acts such as decapitation and the loss of limbs and things even more horrible the likes of which surpasses even a John Woo film. But it all retains the same kind of balletic poetry that Woo's films (his Hong Kong releases, anyway... all his American releases have been awkward in comparison) also invoke.

The series has been running, released here in the US with an amazing translation by Dark Horse, for several years now, so it may be difficult at this point to jump right in. But finding the trade paperbacks is simply a must. Mainstream America craves their comics to be brightly colored, but if you're looking for an introduction into the Japanese realm of gray-scaled, ultra-detailed linework where color doesn't detract from the artist's skill, then this is a must. Blade of The Immortal offers everything that makes a manga (Japanese comics) successful; a finite, cohesive storyline, amazing action scenes and characters to die for. If you don't mind a healthy dose of meaningful violence and gore, pick up Blade and follow Manji as he searches for redemption in a stylized Edo Japan.




Recommended: Yes