Blade of the Immortal: Volume 1: Blood of a Thousand

by Hiroaki Samura, 184 pages

Manji is a masterless samurai longing to make up for the mistakes of his past. He's also essentially immortal, thanks to a mysterious old nun who took him and his mentally-broken sister in when they had nowhere else to go. Now alone in the world, Manji finds himself talked into playing bodyguard to Rin, a young swordswoman bent on revenge. If he can use her cause to help him in his own--to take out a thousand bad men for the hundred good men he guiltily dispatched in the past--he hopes to rid himself of the curse that is his immunity to death.

Manji's not just immortal in the basic "gets back up after being shot" sense. No, that would be too easy and too pretty. His brand of immortality often involves getting sliced in half, crawling after his lost limbs, tucking them in his belt till he can reattach them later, and still raining a hail of lethal blades at his gape-mouthed opponent. Nope, not pretty at all. Except it really kind of is. Samura's art is inarguably swell, all pencil-y and vibrant and realistically proportioned. He's got a flare for the artfully dramatic, but also a sense of humor and a heart, and his attractive, sympathetic characters draw you into their stories despite the high body count (and body-part count--dismemberment seems to be something of a theme).

Still ongoing, this series is one of the longest-running manga titles published in English, having started in the late 1990s, back before "flipping"--mirroring or otherwise manipulating the original right-to-left art to read left-to-right for western audiences--was passé. For whatever reason, Dark Horse has opted to maintain its curiously author-approved practice of combining different flipping methods, making for some continuity awkwardness, such as Manji's missing eye occasionally trading sides of his face. But, for the sake of such a good story, you learn to just go with it. That doesn't mean I don't secretly hold out hope the publishers will someday reissue the entire series-to-date in its original format, but in the meantime I will survive. I'd read good reviews for the series before and had it on my potential-reads list, but when I saw an oversized art book for it at the book store while killing time before my shift, I wanted so badly to know the story behind the mesmerizing characters and part with my meager funds for it that I immediately went to work and Mobius'ed the first volume instead. :) Woo hoo! Libraries are awesome.