1988, First Comics, 59 pages

I have read three of this classic series and cannot conceive of a comic ever being better. As a comic reader I am a neophyte. But I came to the medium as a skeptic and know what I want out of a comic; that is a quick, leisurely read heavily laden with atmosphere and infused with a deep subtext. Lone Wolf and Cub is a work of minimalistic genius. Asaemon the Decapitator is an exemplarily issue.

Asaemon is the successor of Itto Ogami, the Lone Wolf, who was once the Shogun’s decapitator but now walks the assassin’s road to ‘the dark world’. The ideographic nature of Japanese words requires a number of footnotes for us gaijin readers, which are very educational. I look forward to the informative footnotes in these translations.

One finally gets to see the former craft of Itto Ogami as practiced by Asaemon, who holds his outlawed predecessor in awe. After a typical morning’s gruesome work he is called before his master and sent on a quest to bring the Lone Wolf to swift justice. The way the horsemanship scenes are sketched take the reader’s breath away. The feeling of dynamic motion is captured with a fluid ease by Goseki Kojima. For his part Kazuo Koike crafts a deeply metaphoric tale, a simple yet gripping story of fatalistic men following their code to its esoteric conclusion, under the watchful eye of a murderous clan that means them both ill.

I might have titled this comic ‘The Field of Stone Buddahs’ or ‘Trail Markers’ to ‘the Dark World’. I particularly like how the ninjas are not the super do-gooder unbeatable swordsmen as depicted in American film. The master of the Decapitator refers to ninjas as ‘the Watchers in the Garden’, which seems appropriate.