Fred and Loathing on The Internet

Slice of Life and Death

2025-Aug-15

Weeaboo. Japanophile. However you want to call it, that is the kind of topic we have today. Deep down inside, I know I have a not-thoroughly-examined curiosity for Japan. For its history. For its weird stuff. For its animation — not all of it. Sometimes for its printed artwork: the manga. The Japanese comic book industry has put out so many ‘manga’ since the war ended that it would be preposterous for me to say I like most of them. That’d be like a Japanese guy saying he likes American greeting cards.

A manga! A blog publication milestone! The first of its kind to be reviewed on the blog! I had mentioned Astro Boy a few blog posts ago. Tezuka’s mechanical boy was one of the first — a cheerful little robot rocketing out of a post-WW2 Japan. A product of Japanese know-how. Now with a tempered heart. One to better withstand imperialist urges.

The manga we’ll be talking about today is not as old as Astro Boy, or most of Tezuka’s career. Still, the manga we’ll be talking about today is ancient for a contemporary manga aficionado — which is most introverted high schoolers these days. And boy, there are a lot of them in the graphic novel section of Barnes & Noble.

A lot of teenagers. And rows of manga books. The Japanese section easily dwarfs the shelf space catered to the ‘Western’ graphic novels at that store. The ‘non-manga’ side is almost entirely made up of just Marvel, DC, and a few from Image or Dark Horse. Among the Japanese section, there are dozens of titles in every possible category of fiction. At this point, Japan has definitely won the war for the comic book reading sensibilities of American teenagers.

That was just a little bit of color to punch up the introduction to the reprint first omnibus volume of Lone Wolf and Cub I had just finished. It was a meaty, squat sucker weighing in at over five hundred pages. Quite a few of those pages are wordless action scenes — sometimes splash pages that would expand over both pages. The pages cut through my hands as easily as a dotanuki (a type of Japanese katana, known for its robust and thick blade) cuts through a daimyo’s top retainer. There were so many wordless, dynamic action scenes in this book. The kind that could have entertained me back when I would read comics without bothering to read the words.

However graphically pleasing this book would have been to my childish sensibilities, I did not even hear of this title until my early teenage years. That was a time when I was yearning for comic books that made the pretense of being ‘mature.’ X-Men and Spawn put the taste for serialized stories through the comic book medium into my late childhood’s tastes. This taste for serialized stories in graphic form bridged into the brooding teenage era when I wanted dark, cynical takes on any type of literature.

Reprints of a classic Japanese title about a laconic swordsman shackled to his toddler-aged son while he follows a path of revenge were mature as hell. It was about something other than costumed superheroes, and it was foreign. Très mature, indeed. It became one of the titles I searched for among the comic book shops and conventions of my adolescence.

Actually hearing about Lone Wolf and Cub came my way via Wizard Magazine. Somebody born after Wizard ceased publication would have to learn a little about the subtle differences between 2025 and 1998 to understand how much that periodical meant for comic book readers of that era. Talking about Wizard to somebody who came of age after the magazine phased out of use is an incredibly anachronistic pursuit. This was a magazine, a now dead medium, that was about another barely alive medium!

I had read years’ worth of Wizard. First one at a time every few months at my regular visits to not-so-friendly neighborhood comic book shop. Then by mailed-in subscription. Starting sometime in late middle school — 1998ish. I might have kept that subscription into the early 2000s.

1998 and 2025 may look strikingly similar in photographs (of the same resolution). The difference between those years is more often captured between pictures. Because basically, the internet is the unseen character in any photo after the mid-90s. I would contend the most salient difference between photos taken now (in 2025) and in 1998 could be measured by the increase of network nodes in each photo.

Am I rambling? Yeah. A little. This is my blog, not the manga critique journal of record. We’ll get back to that soon. Now, back to Wizard.

Wizard was a place where I could get a look at just about anything that was graphic images with text. It catered to American reader sensibilities, so it was swamped with superhero stuff. To get in on the really cool jokes within the articles or captions, you would have had to learn about the independent comic book stuff.

The weird stuff about flaming carrots, cynical aardvarks that conquer kingdoms, or very foul-mouthed dairy products. The foreign stuff. The avant-garde-for-its-time 70s stuff. There were a lot of inside jokes floating around Wizard. Much like the sitcoms I was watching, I wanted in on the esoteric comic book jokes.

At least one section of each Wizard would make mention of Japanese titles. At the time I had a twinge of chauvinist attitudes toward my comic book purchases. Rarely did I give more than a passing fancy to the manga titles I had heard about. Not even the titles mentioned in Wizard could push me into spending my meager funds on non-Western titles. I felt I barely had enough money to keep up with Marvel, Spawn, and a handful of weird indy titles here and there.

Lone Wolf and Cub was one of the manga titles I read about in Wizard that put a hunk of burning desire in me to read. What I can remember from the article is that it mentioned the utter seriousness the artist took in telling the story. Were it not for Wizard, I do not think I would have come to enjoy the stories of the coolest samurai in literature. The comic book shops and Weeaboo kids I knew were not interested in Japanese cultural products from the 1970s — especially not about such pedestrian stuff as Edo-period swordsmen. Japan stuff at the time was about cyborgs, mechs, or high fantasy. At least the stuff pushing into the comic book shop sphere of the USA.

This interest in the tale of an expert ronin taking on odd assassination jobs with the aid of his child became dormant for years. Lingering until I got free and unfettered access to a repository of literature of all types — including comic books — in college. A time when I would go back and forth over the rows of comic books available to any Texas A&M University student. Up to fifty library items at a time. The climate was often pleasing in temperature, silence, and solitude, so I’d read on the floor between shelves.

I came to that section of the library from actively searching out some of the stuff I had heard about in Wizard but did not find or could not afford back when buying was the only way to find unread comic books. The Evans Library at College Station had about three out of every four comic book entities I could think of from my unwritten list of comic books I always wanted to read. When I burned through the first-run books I had always wanted to read, I would look around the collections that stuck out from the rest.
The Dark Horse Comics reprints of Lone Wolf and Cub stood out. They were not shaped in the usual 6.625 x 10.25-inch page dimensions of American-style comic books. These Lone Wolf books were square-ish. This page size is actually something I do not enjoy to this day. However, it did put a spatial dent among the other books in the library stacks. That oddball shape did contribute to me picking them out of a haystack of great comic books.

The San Antonio Library might be as extensive as what I had available to me as an undergraduate Aggie. For whatever reason, a Japanophile whim struck me recently. I thought about continuing to read about how the disgraced Shogun’s Executioner went on his foreboding journey on the Assassin’s Road — a journey usually taken solo, but this guy does so with the aid of a toddler-aged son. I say aid because this Shogun’s Executioner wields the young boy like a toolbox in his murdering profession.

After rambling on for a few thousand words, this review culminates in just what I like about Lone Wolf and Cub. It does have splendid artwork, equal to any of the overly extravagant 90s comic book artists I personally champion. Not just in scale, but also in technique. No, it’s not the art of this book that keeps a hold on me. It’s the writing! And not the overwrought dialogue that has each character dictating their sword moves as if they were Street Fighter 2 characters with assigned special moves.

The writing I like is between the panels — the mystery of each chapter of the story. Each chapter is reserved for one particular kill. The reader sometimes knows who is supposed to be killed by the end, sometimes not. Each time there is some direction the story goes, but it ends with somebody dying by the hand of the protagonist. There is something unexpected, or expected but nebulous. Most times it is satisfying to see just how this sonofabitch dangles his child — or his reputation as an assassin who dangles his child — as a ploy for his self-righteous journey to kill people who request it and who can pay his fee.