Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima - Lone Wolf and the Cub / Samurai Executioner
I’ve been a bit of a martial arts and oriental freak ever since I saw my first Jet Lie movie. Since then I’ve been interested in zen, bushido, kung-fu and the whole package. At first it was young man’s fumbling in the dark, but as years passed it became not so young man’s awe driven travel through the garden of secrets.
Lone Wolf and the Cub and Samurai Executioner form a single entity in my books. They both are excellent comics. Actually they are more than comics. They are a collection of stories that define what is bushido. They have more in common with Hagakure than comic books. Except that they read like a comic. They are comics for old people. They are comics about fleeting moments and mortality. About choices, responsibility and duty of the lost world. They offer a view to the old Japan, a place where things are not what we modern westerners would think that they are.
The most devastating thing about them is that they manage to transcend their form. The intense experiences that they have offered me are not experiences that could be delivered by pictures or written words. They are something utterly extreme and alien. When you turn the page and suddenly you absolutely realize what happened, you end up sweating and listening to your heart pounding away the empty seconds.
Get them, read them and get ready for something intense.
