Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo may star a bunny rabbit as cute as any in the old “funny animal” subgenre of comicbooks from days gone by, but Miyamoto Usagi is not a joke. Based on the ancient Japanese pictorials (that also featured pre-Manga wide-eyed animals in serious situations) and the life and writings of Miyamoto Musashi, Usagi’s stories take equal inspiration from Japanese cinema and mythology.
 
Surprisingly, some of the best Usagi stories have revolved around creator Stan Sakai’s own vast imagination, as well as direct historical accounts of the Edo period of Japan.
 
Ancient Japanese legends tell the story of the famed Ame-no-Murakumo-no-Tsurugii, the “Sword of the Gathering Clouds of Heaven”. This artifact represents one third of the treasured Imperial Regalia of Japan. Alongside the mirror Yata no Kagami (representing Wisdom) and the jewel Yasakani no Magatama (representing Benevolence), the sword represents Valor. Eventually the “Sword of the Gathering Clouds of Heaven” received a name change to Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi or, in English: “Grasscutter”.

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Jimmy Dean echoes in the popular imagination, with a strange magical resilience. He’ll never grow old, tired, worn out. He’s the opposite of an aging rockstar; no old, no fat, no quiet surrender to the obscurity of needing to work a blue collar job for the last few decades to just now reclaim his fans during the Reunion Tour. There’s something incredibly, immortal about the Dean health and youth and vigor.

Not that there’s any good reason to knock the Aging Rocker archetype. When done right the Aging Rocker, Dylan or the Stones (your opinion of whom to include or exclude on this list will no doubt vary) leads us into very different territory—not immortality, but perpetuity.

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Each time I see this particular issue of Frankenstein, Agent of S.H.A.D.E., I’m drawn back into Sting’s strangest, coolest decade.

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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.