Lone Wolf and Cub Part 3

I confess that for years I was one of those readers that sometimes read through a comic book without paying as much attention to the artwork as I did to the writing. This was no doubt due to a combination of my laziness as a reader, and the sometimes formulaic approach some artists take to their work.

  
Sometimes it easy to accidentally take the artwork for granted… Lone Wolf and Cub was one of those books that forced me to reevaluate this flaw in my comic reading skills. The art is so brilliantly rendered that to call it poetic would not be an overstatement.

The third installment of my series looks at the way artist, Goseki Kojima, approaches the illustrations of fight sequences to enhance the story. What Kojima essentially manages to execute is an entirely new vocabulary of fight sequences. Kojima’s artwork is a kind of education, if not in samurai swordsmanship, then in samurai perception. Harnessing the latent power of comics to construct meaning through the use of the invisible, and relying on such masters of cinema as Akira Kurosawa, Kojima presents readers with an education, moving them from novice-level viewers of the illustrated swordplay, to samurai masters.