EXCLUSIVE PREVIEW

I almost want to say:

There are Unless Places.

Places you don’t end up in, Unless. The kinds of places Junior would talk about when it got late enough at night and cold enough, and he was full of enough alcohol. To say that Junior didn’t drink was an outright lie, but one that he was happy stoking the embers of, and one that he’d get away with when he could. Often for the benefit of female companionship, which was a rare enough thing for Junior. He’d claim his mother was a scientist, which she really was, and that she’d been researching the effects of alcohol on a human body and that it was his birth that forced her to resign her job. And that that was why he’d never touch alcohol. But on the nights when all of us needed something to cling to we knew we could get Perry or Bill or maybe even Wink to push Junior just hard enough and just slowly enough that that staunch veneer of the teetotal lifestyle would warble and crack. And that it was then that Junior would begin to drink more seriously and more honestly than the rest of us. It was after, long after, when Junior’s demons would come for him, and he begin to talk about the world and his place in it. And then and only then, that he would even dare mention Unless Places. He talk about these kinds of places in the past in tones that evoked splendor. The Frontier, the Klondike, the Old West. Places where law had little lease, where found themselves standing tall under darkening skies. The kinds of places you don’t get to go to unless something else has already happened to you…

But of course, that’s not the truth at all.

When Marvel announced the high concept of the Uncanny Avengers title, fans raised an eyebrow. “Hey look! Mutants as Avengers!” was uttered briefly by the collective fanbase and then… nothing. Whether it was due to the title’s frequent shipping delays or the fact that every character in Marvel was an Avenger now, fans moved on from discussing the title at length. That all changed with issue #5.

Who is this rabbit ronin star of Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo? That answer goes back hundreds of years to a man who was a contemporary of William Shakespeare’s, though he lived on the other side of the world. Miyamoto Musashi (also known as Shinmen Takezō, Miyamoto Bennosuke and Niten Dōraku) was the author of Go Rin No Sho (The Book of Five Rings) a tactical and philosophical strategy guide that is still studied today as a guide to business (amongst other things). He was also the founder of his own style of swordsmanship (called “Niten-ryū”) and a wandering ronin (masterless samurai) whose adventures spawned legends that became film and television sagas, remaining popular to this day. Even in Musashi’s own day there were pictorial texts that told his tales in a format not unlike today’s comicbooks.

This artwork may well have been the inspiration for Japanese American Stan Sakai to create his own comicbook based on the life of Musashi. This proposed manga was to focus on the real history of the historical (and quite human) Musashi, until Sakai playfully redrew his version of the ronin as a bunny rabbit with a top knot comprised of his black hair-covered ears. Sakai found the image too compelling to abandon and (after a drawing revision that left the rabbit’s fur all white) Miyamoto became Usagi, a roamin’ ronin with Musashi’s history, but a free background with which to create Sakai’s own world. Still, Japanese films continued to influence Sakai’s gridded page.

Dave Sim’s Cerebus the Aardvark started its decades-long self-published run in 1977 and Grendel’s initially inauspicious bow came the year before the Renaissance artist namesake reptile warriors hit the shops. Initially a parody of Marvel’s mutant comics (which were becoming all the rage) as well as Frank Miller’s work on Ronin and Daredevil and even Cerebus himself, the Turtles spawned spoofs of their own like Karate Kreatures and Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters. Along with Cerebus, Grendel and the other black and white precursors and followers of the TMNT phenomenon, another black and white martial arts cute animal began to hack and slash his way into the comicbook collective in the form of Miyamoto Usagi, the focal character of writer-artist Stan Sakai’s comicbook Usagi Yojimbo.

However, Usagi was neither an imitation of the Turtles, nor a spinoff of their title. In the 1980s, however, this was an easy mistake to make. More than once Usagi guest-starred in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comicbook (and the four brothers from that title returned the favor when they visited Usagi’s own). Usagi appeared in two episodes of the 1987 Turtles animated series and no less than seven episodes of their 2003 cartoon show. The first ever commercially released Usagi Yojimbo toys were part of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figure line (a tie in with the 1987 cartoon).

Once upon a time there was a boy named Eddie who was so gifted physically and mentally that his every goal was attained with careless ease. This led to a life of pride and despair, as nothing had any real meaning attached to it. Thus he formulated a new life of challenges for himself. Eddie became Hunter Rose, wealthy novelist and playboy by day, crime lord and costumed assassin by night. It was this latter role as “Grendel” that lived long after his death at the hands of a Native American man-wolf named Argent.

So we are told in the stories by writer/ artist Matt Wagner, creator of Grendel. The character debuted in 1982’s Comico Primer #2 and continued first in his own series, then (when publisher Comico began to experience financial difficulties, resulting in the cancellation of Grendel) as a backup story in the pages of Wagner’s more heroic creation Mage.

Interest in Grendel rose (no pun intended) due to his appearances in Mage and resulted in a new ongoing series. By this time Hunter Rose had become a dark legend, spread by the (fictional) biographical novel Devil by Deed written by Christine Spar (daughter of Rose’s adoptive daughter Stacy Palumbo). When Spar’s son is kidnapped by (no, I’m not making this up) a Vampire Kabuki dancer, Spar becomes the first to take up the mask of Grendel after Rose, initially in a quest to rescue her son, then in a quest to pretty much shish kebab every Tom, Dick, Harry or Sally she comes across. And thus the legend became a legacy.