Story Title: Vendetta’s End
Reviewer: Paul Sebert
Writer: Stan Sakai
Art: Stan Sakai
Coloring: Glorious Black & White!
Editor: Diana Schultz
Publisher: Dark Horse
Bandits to fight, a rival samurai seeking vengeance, and man seeking atonement for his sins. Just a typical day on the wanderer’s road for comics most venerable and formidable samurai.
In this month’s stand alone tale, Usagi finds himself struck between a swordsman trying to find the killer of his father, and a bandit turned Buddhist monk trying to make up for his past life. The plot of this issue moves rather straight forward and in a predictable manner but the strength of Sakai’s characterization does still manage to shine through.
The real treat of this issue (as with many issues) is watching Stan Sakai’s pen at work, as the deceptively simple anthropomorphic inhabitants of Sakai’s Japan carry with them a wonderful elegance to them. There’s nice little action sequence to cap off this issue but for the most part things are solved through words not actions. And not in the chatty Bendis kinda way, I mean genuine moral debate.
This is a nice little self-contained story which pretty much serves as a key example of what Sakai’s work is all about. Which is alas this issue’s greatest merit and biggest problem. New readers will find this a perfect jumping on point while those already within the Sakai faithful will have seen this all before.
