/lit/ - Literature

My opinion: the greatest comic story ever made (a complete single tale by one creative team) is Lone Wolf and Cub (子連れ狼 Kozure Ōkami, 1970-76), a manga set in 17th-century Japan, by writer Kazuo Koike and artist Goseki Kojima. Over 8,700 pages it tells one epic story of implacable vengeance, while weaving philosophy, politics, and a great deal of feudal Japanese history with bloody violence and perversions. Ultimately it shows the painful passing of the age of the samurai, with Ogami Ittō, the shogun's executioner and perhaps the most dangerous man of his age, exemplifying the lost martial life-path of bushido. During the Tokugawa shogunate, samurai increasingly became courtiers, bureaucrats, and administrators rather than warriors. Ittō's mastery of Suiō-ryū Iai Kenpō and even his choice of weapon--a dōtanuki katana, thick, heavy, plain and sharp--mark him as a relic of a passing era. As a rōnin and assassin for hire (despite having a toddler in his care) Ittō manages to shake the very foundations of the power that betrayed him--the increasingly stratified and labyrinthine social structures of the Tokugawa shogunate--and devastates the Yagyū clan that murdered his family and disgraced him. It's bloody, Gothic, melodramatic stuff, but it's also superb, immensely rich, and in some ways even profound.

Kazuo Koike (1936--) and artist Goseki Kojima (1928-2000) came to be known as the "Golden Duo" from the success of their first collaboration, Lone Wolf and Cub. They went on to do other Tokugawa-era series like Kubikiri Asa (Samurai Executioner 1972-76), and Hanzo no Mon (Path of the Assassin 1978-84), and Koike also wrote famed manga with other artists, among them Shurayuki-hime (Lady Snowblood with Kazuo Kamimura, 1972–73), Kuraingu Furīman (Crying Freeman with Ryoichi Ikegami, 1986-88), Maddo Buru Sanjūyon (Mad Bull 34 with Noriyoshi Inoue, 1986-90), and Shin Kozure Okami (New Lone Wolf and Cub with artist Hideki Miri Mori, 2003-06). In 1977, Koike founded the Gekiga Sonjuku college program aimed at helping talented writers and artists break into the manga field--though not all his students adopted the realistic and serious gekiga style. Some graduates of Koike's Gekika Sonjuku include Rumiko Takahashi (Urusei Yatsura, Ranma ½, InuYasha, etc.), Hideyuki Kikuchi (Vampire Hunter D), Tetsuo ( Fist of the North Star), Naoki Yamamoto(Dance till Tomorrow), and Takayuki Yamaguchi (Apocalypse Zero, Shigurui). His influence on the manga form, overall, is immense.

>>13733199
My opinion: the greatest comic story ever made (a complete single tale by one creative team) is Lone Wolf and Cub (子連れ狼 Kozure Ōkami, 1970-76), a manga set in 17th-century Japan, by writer Kazuo Koike and artist Goseki Kojima. Over 8,700 pages it tells one epic story of implacable vengeance, while weaving philosophy, politics, and a great deal of feudal Japanese history with bloody violence and perversions. Ultimately it shows the painful passing of the age of the samurai, with Ogami Ittō, the shogun's executioner and perhaps the most dangerous man of his age, exemplifying the lost martial life-path of bushido. During the Tokugawa shogunate, samurai increasingly became courtiers, bureaucrats, and administrators rather than warriors. Ittō's mastery of Suiō-ryū Iai Kenpō and even his choice of weapon--a dōtanuki katana, thick, heavy, plain and sharp--mark him as a relic of a passing era. As a rōnin and assassin for hire (despite having a toddler in his care) Ittō manages to shake the very foundations of the power that betrayed him--the increasingly stratified and labyrinthine social structures of the Tokugawa shogunate--and devastates the Yagyū clan that murdered his family and disgraced him. It's bloody, Gothic, melodramatic stuff, but it's also superb, immensely rich, and in some ways even profound.

The greatest epic of samurai in any genre.

Lone Wolf & Cub, or anything else by Kazuo Koike. Yes, it has pictures. Read it anyway.

>>5352703
I mentioned some of them in my long-winded three-part post above, but there are a few great ones out there. Promethea, taken as a whole storyline, is some of Moore's more interesting work, and it shows his wrestling with Kabalah/ritual magic in ways that are worth dismantling. P. Craig Russell's adaptations of operas have some excellent use of visual motifs to match the missing musical leitmotifs, and his draughtsmanship is fabulous. Lone Wolf and Cub is an extraordinary saga, as is Cerebus, and I like to deal with the underground artists (Crumb, Shelton) and so forth. There's so much to cover that I sometimes just dismantle a page or two on-screen with the class, especially with older work like Eisner or Kirby.
I also often include a graphic novel in my survey courses (Frank Miller's Ronin and P. Craig Russell's adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac’s A Voyage to the Moon in Science Fiction and of Michael Moorcock's Elric in Fantasy, Batman: The Long Halloween in Mystery, lectures on the history of comics in Horror Fiction and Children's Lit, and so forth) and they're always well-received by the class.