Usagi Yojimbo: Book Five: Lone Goat and Kid

by Stan Sakai, 142 pages

After his lord is betrayed and killed in battle, upright samurai Miyamoto Usagi wanders throughout Japan, offering his bodyguard services to the worthy and countering the nefarious doings of the corrupt nobleman who caused his lord's death.

In this volume, Usagi recovers a dead samurai's swords, helps protect a village from attacking ninja, and gets caught up in a web meant to trap an honorable assassin and his son.

Stan Sakai is pretty brilliant. Not only does he succeed in building a vibrant, cohesive world filled with allusions to Japanese historical figures (Miyamoto Musashi, for starters), pop culture (Akira Kurosawa, Toshiro Mifune, Godzilla, Zatoichi, Lone Wolf and Cub, among many others), and traditional crafts (such as the kite-making in this volume), but he does so without casting a single human being.

As you might guess from the cover (or the title, "usagi yojimbo" literally meaning "rabbit bodyguard"), our noble hero Usagi is a rabbit--not a bunny; though he can at first glance be deceptively cute, bunnies don't usually go around causing little cartoonish skull-and-crossbone thought bubbles to appear over their unfortunate opponents' heads. In his pursuit of honor and justice, Usagi encounters cat ninjas, bat ninjas, snake lords, goat assassins, a blind pig swordsman, a rhino ronin (or masterless samurai), and highways, fortresses, and villages populated with lions, tigers, and bears and an assortment of other animals who, like himself, are utterly human in every other way.

Sakai has won a handful of Eisner awards over the years, has long lettered for Sergio Aragonés' hysterical Groo the Wanderer, and has lettered for and is friends with Stan Lee (who wrote the introduction to this volume).