This gripping manga story vividly recreates the turmoil and savage cruelty of the time period.
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One of the most talented and productive manga artists today is Takehiko Inoue. Two of the top basketball comics on the market, Slam Dunk and Real, are among the manga he has created. His opus Vagabond, a samurai epic that he has been writing since the late ’90s, is Inoue’s best work to date. Following the samurai Miyamoto Musashi’s life following the Battle of Sekigahara, Vagabond is based on the critically acclaimed novel Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa. During this time, the feudal kingdoms that had been at war with one another banded together to form the new Tokugawa Shogunate. This gripping manga story vividly recreates the turmoil and savage cruelty of the time period.
Since September 1998, it has been serialized in the seinen manga magazine Morning by Kodansha. As of July 2014, the chapters had been compiled into 37 tank-bon volumes. As of April 2015, Viz Media has released all thirty-seven volumes of the series in English in North America under a license. The most recent chapter of the series, which was published in May 2015, is now on an extended pause. One of the best-selling manga series of all time, the manga had over 82 million copies in circulation as of December 2012. Vagabond won the 24th Kodansha Manga Award in 2000 for Best General Manga and the 6th Tezuka Osamu Culture Prize Grand Prize in 2002.
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Action sequences in Seinen comics are renowned for being excellent. One of the reasons they are so popular is because of this. The best seinen manga successfully blends the sadness or horror that results from violent outcomes with the cool “wow” aspect of spectacular combat sequences. The fight sequences in Vagabond perfectly depict the visceral, heart-pounding clash of swords when anyone’s next move could be their death. Samurai heave their bloody, battered bodies forward while katanas ring against one another, driven by pure resolve. Nonetheless, this series excels at capturing the tense pauses between fights when adversaries face off, pulses racing, and breaths labored as they prepare for the next situation knowing that only success or death awaits.
The artist Takahiko Inoue is a genius! He uses clear, crisp lines to depict Vagabond, alternating between a minimalist aesthetic that is common in anime and highly rich, refined textures. Inoue can illustrate for pages the calm, quiet times when people are just standing around thinking about themselves, but he still manages to make it interesting to look at. Every leaf and tree is vividly depicted when he depicts a forest. Despite all of his exquisitely rendered quiet moments, Vagabond’s fame is also due to the breathtaking action. Every battle is exciting because of the various techniques he has discovered for capturing movement in combat scenarios.
One of the greatest swordsmen in Japanese history, Miyamoto Musashi, was the series’ central figure. When he was just thirteen years old, he defeated a skilled samurai in his first duel. Yet the manga begins when he is in his early twenties and has significantly improved in talent. The man who authored the definitive work on Japanese swordsmanship is Miyamoto. He was unbeaten in one-on-one combat and participated in one of the pivotal conflicts in Japanese history. Musashi was given the honorific title of “sensei,” or “sword-saint,” for his unbridled energy and concentration. He is one of the most fascinating historical personalities in Japanese history, and the manga does a fantastic job of illustrating exactly how emotionally nuanced and physically impressive he was.
It might be a bit of an emotional roller coaster to be a vagabond. There are times of utter joy and times of utter dread. One thing that Inoue excels at is maintaining a sense of tension over an extended period of time as it builds up to a climactic moment. As a result, even seemingly little turns of luck seem all the more intriguing after the protracted buildup to them. Also, the antagonists are so repulsive that it’s impossible to not feel bad for Musashi as he battles through everything they subject him to, making his journey all the more relevant and personal.
