| FanimeCon - Day Three - Stan Sakai |
 Why a rabbit?
When artist Stan Sakai set out to retell the stories of Japan's feudal
era in his Usagi Yojimbo series, why did he choose to make the lead character
a rabbit? "He looks good with his ears tied up," Sakai joked at first.
Then he noted, "The rabbit has been long revered in Japanese culture. Instead
of a man in the moon, it's a `rabbit in the moon.'" Sakai also said that
he grew up with another rabbit character on U.S. TV, the mostly-forgotten
Crusader Rabbit animated cartoon from the 1960's. The other "Yojimbo" influence,
the noted samurai film by that name, shows in the appearance of the rhinoceros
Gen, whose five o'clock shadow came from actor Toshiro Mifune. |
 Sakai has
been drawing Yojimbo's adventures for 16 years, and there's a lot left
to be told. "I just started to scratch the surface of the stories I want
to tell," he said. He produces one page of the book each day, using stories
that are based on Japanese folklore, while other stories are his own invention.
Yojimbo may be more popular in Europe than in the U.S., with the book now
going on sale in Italy, France and the Netherlands - even in Croatia. "When
the (Croatian) publisher approached me, I asked him `Isn't there a war
there?' He said `That's Bosnia, not Croatia,'" Sakai recalled. |
 As Sakai stood
at his table in the FanimeCon artists' alley, there was a steady stream
of fans who walked up to visit. In turn, Sakai showed them pages in progress
from a Yojimbo series he's writing on a deadline, which places his characters
into the story of the building of a historic shrine in Nagoya. Sakai said
that was a tough story to tell because he wanted his drawings of the shrine
to be accurate, and he had experienced a hard time finding reference pictures
of the building. |
 Yojimbo is
deliberately drawn in a cartoony style, in the manner of Sergio Aragones,
the artist whose Groo the Wanderer is lettered by Sakai. That cartoony
style of drawing has gone out of fashion with some artists, following the
example of Todd MacFarlane, who have adopted a hyper realistic style for
their super hero books. "They've gotten too extreme," Sakai comments, "with
fists the size of heads - it's gotten so distorted." Sakai recalled Aragones
confronting one of those hyper-realistic artists at a dinner and complaining
that "You are the guys who ruined comic books! Now everyone expects us
to have perfect anatomy." |
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Day Two |
Day Three |
Day Four |
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