 A third-generation
American of Japanese descent, Stan Sakai is a regular guest at Fanime con
and has a legion of fans for his Usagi Yojimbo series of comics about a
ronin rabbit in feudal Japan. But there's a sense of irony around Sakai
when he talks about his work, as he did on Saturday at Fanime Con. For
one thing, the Yojimbo comics have fans in Europe, but not necessarily
in Japan. Sakai thinks that's because manga is so popular in Japan that
American-style comics, such as his, don't appeal to the Japanese reader.
"They think that Western comic books are very superficial," said Sakai.
And the small size of American books makes them look like pamphlets in
comparison to the thick weekly and monthly manga publications. |
 Yojimbo has
one thing in common with manga; it's in black and white, bucking the American
tradition of color comics. Sakai said he was persuaded once to come out
with a color Yojimbo, and was surprised to find that his fans didn't like
the color version. Sales for the color Yojimbo actually dropped, and didn't
rebound until the series went back to the original monochrome, he said.
And even stranger was that sales actually increased when the series' single-issue
price was increased from $2 to $2.50. |
 Yojimbo remains
a mix of fantasy and reality. the fantasy comes from the idea of talking
animals waging feudal conflicts with live steel. "I choose the animals
because they look good," Sakai notes, saying that the selected species
usually don't carry their real-life nature into the comics pages (although
he did make a snake into a villain once). While animals don't fight those
kinds of wars, Sakai uses the history of feudal Japan as a guide to the
stories he writes. "The research adds to the credibility. Lack of credibility
destroys a story, even if it just happens to feature funny animals," he
said. |
