I refer to the first four volumes of LW&C as the Meifumado arc, which consists of a series of adventures that do not follow a timeline per se, jumping about the place in terms of timeline and after-effects of one episode following the other. There is an internal continuity to some of the stories, in particular those that deal with the beginning of Ogami Itto and Daigoro’s journey. The origin story, so to speak.

Meifumado is the Buddhist term for hell, a place inhabited by demons of Japanese myth. (This is the definition given by Koike in the book, and I am not sufficiently well-versed in Buddhist Theology to determine the deeper meaning of the term.) It is the path chosen by Ogami Itto following a tragic event in his life. Once a man with twenty-seven years of dedicated service to the Shogun behind him, it was a culmination of circumstances – part of which was instigated by political rivals, that forced Itto to abandon the way of Bushido and travel the path of hell, the life of an assassin. At first glance, there isn’t much difference between Itto’s previous incarnation and this – both involved bloodshed, corpses and a hardened heart. But while the post of the shogun’s executioner required a blind allegiance to duty, the road to Meifumado was akin to that of an outlaw, free of society’s rules and moires, with the lives taken paid for with the sum of five hundred ryos.

How do Koike and Kojima inject life into a series that, at surface value, is the life of an assassin? It’s surprising to see the storytelling techniques at display here. The assumption the reader needs to make, while beginning a story in the early Lone Wolf and Cub stories is the invulnerability of the duo. There are more than 7000 pages to go before the journey concludes, and its fairly obvious that no major harm would come to the eponymous protagonists in the initial stories.

It would also be right to emphasise that these stories are not necessarily about Lone Wolf and Cub, they sometimes involve these characters as a plot resolution of some form. Some of them are a study in the twisted nature of vengeance – like the fourteenth story – Winter Flower ( volume 2). The story begins as a police procedural in an unnamed town, where the inspector of the province investigates the double-murder of a couple and a prostitute’s suicide, both seemingly unrelated, but as the story goes by, we see the connections unfold through the eyes of the investigating officer. How the presence of a mysterious ronin accompanied by a baby in the vicinity tie in to the deaths are explained at the very end, when the officer looks at a winter flower given to him by the ronin – the same flower that was found at the murder-site, and understands for himself as the strands of the story come together. Some stories involve the accidental involvement of Ogami Itto and his son, the story The Virgin and the Whore being a particular example. A young girl, sold into prostitution, tries to escape her fate by killing the man about to escort her to the brothel. While running away from the yakuza gang which has bought her, she takes shelter in an inn, incidentally inside the same room that was occupied by Ogami Itto and his son. When the gang-leader, a shrewd lady, humbly requests the ronin for the girl he is sheltering, an interesting chain of events occur. Was it just coincidence that the assassin was at the inn or was all of it an elaborate ruse to carry through a hit? Don’t worry, the ending comes as a surprise, regardless of what you might assume at this point.

Political intrigues of the period take precedence in most of the assassination plots that involve Ogami Itto. In the story Close Quarters ( Volume 3) a clan requires him to dispose of dissidents who oppose the cutting down of a forest – the clan leaders want to reduce their trade debt to merchants by supplying Edo with wood at lower rates, while the rebels claim that destroying the forest would cause their towns to be flooded during rainfall. Itto is contracted to kill the dissedents without the forest being destroyed, because the dissidents have lodged themselves at strategic points, threatening to burn the trees before letting their leaders chop them down in the name of commerce. There is the peculiar request of the father in The Bell Warden, an official entrusted with the task of maintaining the official Town Bells in Edo, who wants his three sons to duel with the Lone Wolf in a bid to select the worthiest of them to carry on the family occupation. The Coming of the Cold makes Ogami Itto impersonate a law official to infiltrate a clan castle and assassinate the clan elder – the catch being that the contract is placed by the faithful retainers of the clan who feel the leader’s actions would cause them to lose face.

“To Lose Face” – something that is one of the most important aspects of feudal Japanese society, where honour and personal loyalty were considered greater than one’s life, if one were a samurai. Lone Wolf and Cub plays on this theme a lot, revelling in this singular Japanese trait and at the same time showing it for the vainglorious relic it was. In all the examples mentioned above, “face” plays a major role in determining the course of action of the people concerned, even among those not from samurai society. One of the principles we twenty-first century beings might find outdated ( not to mention bizarre) is the concept of regaining one’s honour through killing oneself, but it was a way of life then, and Lone Wolf and Cub also becomes an examination of bushido, from that standpoint. It’s interesting to see how the themes of honour and vengeance are interlocked in most of the stories, with most of the contract killings being related to a clan’s honour or an individual’s loss of face.

Not to say that the early volumes of Lone Wolf and Cub are lacking in the ingredients that typified the genre it was published under – action and sex. One of the early adventures involves Ogami Itto on a sea voyage, boarding the same ship as three fearsome brothers – the Bentenrai, each of whom are well-versed in a weapon of choice. Which means a proliferation of scenes like these:

As it turns out, the three brothers are enroute to protect the same client as Ogami Itto has been contracted to kill, and it ends in a face-off between the ronin and the three mercenaries. The icing on the cake is the death-speech of the brother who has the ill-luck to die by a diagonal throat-cut at Itto’s hands – the resulting arterial spray causes a keening sound referred to as ‘The Flute of the Fallen Tiger’ ( the same name as the story ). A Death-speech ( my term, I forget what the precise Japanese term is ) is the practise of having an ill-fated person, slashed at the hands of his enemy muttering a near-poetic sentence just before he dies, a good example would be O-Ren Ishii’s “That really was a Hanzo sword” line at the end of Kill Bill Vol 1.

Throughout the journey, Ogami Itto and Daigoro encounter other ronin who walked the land at that time. Japanese history tells us that during the Edo period, the rigid feudal structure of society had led to a proliferance of samurai who lost their masters in court intrigues or the machinations of the centralized shogunate. Most samurai found themselves assimilated as paid retainers of their lords or forced to the streets bereft of land. “Half Mat, One Mat, A Fistful of Rice” ( Volume 2) figures one such ronin, who makes his living holding streetshows in which he dares people to hit his head, sticking up through a hole in a mat, with a weapon of their choice. If they can go ahead and hit him before he dodges, they are free to scavenge his dead body with all the money they can fight. On meeting Ogami Itto and his son, the ronin suggests that Itto take to a better life to ensure that his son has a better future, to which Itto refuses, leading to a showdown between the two. Again, what is interesting here is not the actual fight itself, but the phiosophical argument between the two samurai, one who has no faith in the current society urging the other to reform himself and become a part of the social order once again. Another story “Parting Frost” ( Volume 4) is about Daigoro, as he searches for his father through the countryside – Kojima excels in drawing the silent montage of pages where the child walks, mute and uncomplaining, through the pouring rain. When he takes shelter in a temple, a wandering ronin sees him. Intrigued by the child’s shishogan, the eyes that show no fear or emotion, perfectly balanced in life and death, the swordsman follows the child from a distance, watching him get trapped in a forest fire without trying to help him. His curiousity is rewarded – Daigoro lives through the fire by sheer force of will – but in this child, the swordsman sees someone he can never be, and he lunges to kill him. Like I said, the line of reasoning followed by most individuals in the series is at odds with what we ourselves might consider logical or fairly obvious.

As Frank Miller put it in his introduction, this is a cruel, mad world that the characters inhabit.

It is in volume 3 that the origin story, part of which is narrated in Vol 1, the ninth chapter ‘The Assassin’s Road’, is fully explained, and the reader is given more details about the insidious dealings of the Yagyu clan, which sets into motion the chain of events leading to the transformation of the shogun’s executioner into an errant assassin. Koike’s storytelling skills have never been in doubt, but it is worthy enough to mention here that he gives us the backstory to a backstory in this tale, titled “White Path Between to the Rivers”. Masterfully told, as always.

However, the best story in this arc remains ‘The Gateless Barrier’ – the last story in volume 2, which deserves a post in itself. To be continued.

What is Lone Wolf and Cub all about? Simply put, it is a revenge story set in the Edo period, when the Tokugawa shogunate ruled over Japan. It’s the story of a wronged samurai named Ogami Itto and his baby son Daigoro, and how father and son seek to avenge their family honour in the face of relentless , powerful opponents. Above all, it’s a study of samurai life, Japanese society and human morals set in a time that is drastically different from our own, in an arena where the rules are substantially different. It’s historical fiction and it’s a pulp adventure and it’s a morality play. And yes, it’s one of the most influential manga series ever written, inspiring characters from different genres and cultures.

Lone Wolf and Cub, like most good things we know and love, was a product of the seventies. It was written by Kazuo Koike, a man much influenced by the gekiga movement in manga espoused by Yoshihiro Tatsumi, a move to more realism and experimentation in storytelling style. Koike opted for historical fiction served with liberal doses of sex and violence- much like Sanpei Shirato’s Kamui (1965-67). He began Lone Wolf and Cub in 1970 with a series of short stories illustrated by Goseki Kojima, then an up-and-coming manga-artist, serialized in Manga Action magazine. As the series progressed, the storyline became more complex, with Koike incorporating Zen philosophical observations in his stories, introducing little-known aspects of Japanese society, and brought twisted moral motivations to his characters. Kojima’s exquisite black-and-white brushwork held it all together, featuring detailed images of the Japanese countryside and settlements, brutal renditions of fight scenes, and quiet, multiple-page-spanning moments of the baby Daigoro and his father. The final product was 28 volumes in all, culminating in an ending which can be called- using the greatest of all understatements I can use – epic.

It was not until 1988 that the first English translations of Lone Wolf were published, bringing the series into mass consciousness of the Occidental world. Even before that, the ( untranslated ) series gained a lot of prominence among comicbook artists and the Japan aficionados, one of them being Frank Miller –  who claimed, in the introduction to the first issue of the translated version of how 250 pages of back-to-back reading left him “babbling like an idiot”. It was First Comics that brought this series to America in the 1980s, just when manga and anime was seeping into the counter-culture consciousness. These 48-page comics were printed on high-quality paper, each of the issues bearing covers by noted artists like Frank Miller, Bill Sienkiewicz and Matt Wagner. Early issues also had introductions by Miller, who revelled in his fan-boy love of the series by writing extremely florid descriptions of the series.

There were problems, though. The principal being that First Comics chose not to print the stories in their published order. Because of the assumption that the US market needed their stories more accessible (read: dumbed down), they chose to publish stories in chronological order. Which meant that the early First issues had the origin of Ogami Itto’s vendetta, instead of the actual storylines. Not a bad thing, but you know the problem about reading order – it’s like forcing someone to read The Magician’s Nephew before The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe just because events in Magician’s happen before the latter. Later issues had random storylines clubbed together from early Lone Wolf and Cub tales. All this is not necessarily bad, sometime or the other, First Comics would have been able to cover all the LW&C stories. That point was rendered moot by the fact that after publishing 45 issues of Lone Wolf and Cub, the company went bankrupt in the late 80s. As a result, only about 2000 pages of this epic tale were published in English, roughly a fourth of the complete story. And it has to be said – the story hadn’t even got to the good parts.

Enter Dark Horse comics, twelve years later. The manga boom had arrived in the USA by then, with companies like Viz and Tokyopop already bringing out popular titles that had found extended reader-bases, and Dark Horse following suit by reprinting some of the classic series – Masumone Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell and Appleseed, Katsuhiro Otomo’s Domu and Akira. Based on a deal with Koike Shoin publishing, Japan, ( incidentally, owned by Kazuo Koike himself, in sharp contrast to publisher-owned manga properties, the writer had obtained the rights to all his series from the original publisher Fuso-sha) Dark Horse acquired the rights to bringing back into print Lone Wolf and Cub. Instead of choosing to go the normal 32-page or 48-page pamphlet form, the company opted to print the series the way it was originally collected in Japan, 28 4-inch by 6-inch volumes of 250-300 pages each. Not only was this format in sync with the new publishing model followed by manga companies, it also served to keep costs down, so that the volumes cost 9.95$ each when they came out, a perfectly fair price to bring in a healthy reader-base for this long series. Dana Lewis along with Studio Proteus, one of the pioneers in manga translations, undertook new translations for the series. The other concession made for the American market was that the manga was flipped – which means, the reading order of the original artwork, back-to-front, right-to-left was changed to the western left-to-right format. This was done by reversing the artwork, resulting in incongruities like almost characters in the series becoming left-handed. Covers were by American artists, with all of Miller’s covers for the First comics being reused initially and newer covers designed by Mike Ploog, Matt Wagner, Vince Locke and Guy Davis.

The twenty-eighth volume of the Dark Horse reprint came out in December 2002. Dark Horse stuck to a release schedule of a volume per month, quite a foolhardy venture, considering that the editorial process had to be put into place for 300 or more pages per month!

I have read and reread the volumes a number of times since I got them, both in digital and actual formats. There have been more works by Koike/Kojima published by Dark Horse after that, the ten-volume Samurai Executioner and the currently ongoing Path of the Assassin. But it’s Lone Wolf and Cub that keeps calling me back every now and then. And the more I look around, it looks as if there isn’t anyone comprehensively writing about how good this series gets as it progresses. I know a lot of folks who start reading it, and lose interest by the 10^th volume, just because the story gets a little repetitive. Trust me, Koike and Kojima have crafted a story that demands your attention. It requires the reader to focus on a journey without worrying about how long it will take or where it will go. Because unlike stories about super-humans or larger-than-life franchises which have to go on, so that the creators and the publishers can milk all possible storytelling avenues dry, Lone Wolf and Cub has an ending. It becomes all too apparent to the reader by the time the storyline enters its second arc (I have mentally divided the series into a number of arcs, each arc representing a logical progression of Ogami Itto and Daigoro’s journey ) that the Koike and Kojima have no intention of running in circles.

So this is what I am about to do. Over the period of the next couple of days ( or weeks. You know my writing habits) I am going to write about each volume of Lone Wolf and Cub. There will not be spoilers, for the some of you who have not read the series yet and want to read it someday. Some will have read the series already. Most, I gather, don’t give a flying fart about what I write or am going to write, so this is your chance – give this idea-space a miss unless you want to know more about this amazing series.  Right now would be…uh…a good time to really figure out if you really need me on your f-lists.

Onward, then.