Samurai Executioner, Vol. 8 - Softcover

Kazuo Koike

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1593072775 ISBN 13: 9781593072773

Publisher: Dark Horse, 2006

Synopsis

Spring is a season of rebirth, or new life springing forth, a time of cherished blooming and delightful scents. But for Kubikira Asa, there is no spring delight. The Edo-era samurai crime drama by Lone Wolf and Cub creators Koike and Kojima continues down its path of heinous crime and diligent, bloody justice. Spring may come to the innocent, but to those condemned to lose their heads to Asa's sword, it will be their last.

About this title

About the Author

Kazuo Koike is a prolific Japanese manga writer, novelist, and entrepreneur. Early in Koike's career, he studied under Golgo 13 creator Takao Saito and served as a writer on the series. Koike, along with artist Goseki Kojima, made the manga Kozure Okami (Lone Wolf and Cub), and Koike also contributed to the scripts for the 1970s film adaptations of the series, which starred famous Japanese actor Tomisaburo Wakayama. Another series written by Koike, Crying Freeman, which was illustrated by Ryoichi Ikegami, was adapted into a 1995 live-action film by French director Christophe Gans.

Goseki Kojima was a Japanese manga artist known for his collaborations with Kazuo Koike. The team was often referred to as the “Golden Duo.” Kojima’s best-known work was Lone Wolf and Cub. Other titles attributed to Kojima are Samurai Executioner and Path of the Assassin. In 2004, Kojima won an Eisner Award.

Reviews

Acclaimed manga master Koike's historical series look enough alike to suggest that his relationship to his artist collaborators is like that of a film director to a cinematographer. He probably constructs scenarios detailed right down to angles of vision and charges the artists to realize them with differing degrees of realism.

Samurai Executioner is drawn in a poetic realist style. Gushing blood, grimacing faces, rain, wind, and fire appear next-to--photographic at first; a beat later, the lines and shadings that conjure mood register. One could rush through a story barely noticing Kojima's craftsmanship, especially in The Death Sign of Spring's two hyperviolent volume openers about men of very different stations who in essence go berserk. Asaemon the executioner's exceptional compassion is the point of the next three shorter, quieter stories, one of which lacks violence, though--this is another story about the eponymous heroine of Shinko the Kappa (2005)--not sex. There is less swirling black ink in those three, which makes sense. The concluding two stories about offenders roused to fury by perceived injustice return to the noirish lighting effects of the first two. Ray Olson
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Edition details

• Publisher: Dark Horse
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1593072775
• ISBN 13: 9781593072773
• Binding: Paperback
• Illustrator: Goseki Kojima
• Number of pages: 304