I should start by confessing that I’ve ready very little manga. There is no real reason for it except that my comic book preferences have always bent toward superheroes and the manga explosion of the last two decades passed me by because of other interests. The Legend of Kamui, therefore, is probably the first real manga I’ve ever read.

I came across this in a quarter bin at Free Comic Book Day this year, finding a reprint series published by Eclipse in the very late 1980s. The covers looked interesting, and I like a good ninja story, so I pulled one or two into my stack. Then, I kept finding more; so many, in fact, that I looked the series up on Mike’s Amazing World and realized that all 37 issues of the serise were in the longbox I was flipping through. That is, of you do the math, only $9.25. To quote Professor Alan, a quarter bin steal.

The story is that Kamui is a ninja who has left his clan and they are now after him because the penalty for doing so is death. What his life–and the comic–becomes is a series of stories where he finds himself in various places feudal Japan and never seems to be safe because he’s paranoid that someone is trying to kill him,someone is actually trying to kill him. There are tangents out toward another ninja is hunting Kamui and flashbacks into the life of an eccentric old monk who has influence over our characters and a role in the overall story.

Eclipse broke the series into multi-part storylines and in the back of each comic there are text pieces about the culture of the time or things to know about ninja and samurai. There are also, of course, lettercolumns. This made the series very easy to read–I could pick up a stack of four or six issues at a time and read them–and fascinating learning.

As for the book itself? Great stuff. The story moves at a fast clip and the action is dynamic. There were times when I felt the author went a little too far away from the main characters, but things were good enough story-wise that I didn’t mind.

I know (via Wikipedia) that this is actually only part of a much larger story and that much of that story was reprinted in trade paperbacks. At the moment, I’m not looking to spend the money on several trades of manga, although I may see if hte library has some. But this is a series to bookmark and if you find these on the really cheap (like in a quarter bin, where 80s and 90s indepedent comics abound), I recommend getting it.

Keep, Sell, Donate, or Trash?

Keep.