ARTBOOK SPOTLIGHT: Vagabond Illustration Collection: Sumi

Takehiko Inoue – Viz – 2008 – paperback – 158 pages
Sumi is still in print and available in English, so if you’re interested, try Amazon.

Viz has published a fair number of artbooks over the years, most as tie-ins to very popular series.  I have most of a few of them.  In the spirit of “don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone” that CMX has inspired in me lately, I thought it might be worthwhile to take a look at one of them, so here’s one I picked up a few months back.

Viz’s artbooks are often near-perfect reproductions of a book that has already come out in Japan, and they are generally indistinguishable from their Japanese counterparts save for language and a few publisher logos. The books in Viz’s “The Art Of” line are almost all hardcovers, but this Inoue book happens to be paperback. I believe most of these books are printed in Japan, and I’ve never noticed any printing quality or binding issues. They are very, very nice books, and usually aren’t that expensive considering what they are.

Sumi features Takehiko Inoue’s black and white illustration work from Vagabond.  There is a companion volume, Water, that features the color artwork, but I’ve never seen that one myself. Inoue is quite an artist, especially with ink illustrations.  He uses gestural, heavy inks intermittently throughout Vagabond, and its one of the things I love most about the series.

So.  Here’s a brief look at it.  Once again, I kind of hate posting images, so if asked to take them down, I will.  Also, another reminder that I don’t have a scanner, Photoshop, or knowledge of how to take good digital stills.

(you can click on most of these to see them larger)

I loved the cover.  I especially liked the clever touch of Musashi’s cropped head wrapping around the jacket to the inside front flap.

And the nice, bright red endpapers.  The book is bound like a regular Japanese paperback, with the inside papers glued in such a way that the cover and endpapers bow out and make a little… handle so that the removable, heavy jacket doesn’t slide off when its open.

Admittedly, I was a little disappointed that much of the art was from actual comic pages rather than ink illustration.  But after flipping through it, I remembered one of the reasons I like Vagabond so much is because Inoue includes a lot of ink illustration in his comic art.

This is a good example.  This is more illustrative than it is art from the comic (though it is that, I think this is Musashi’s battle with the elder Yoshioka), but it still includes a lot more detail than a typical sumi-e illustration.  For the purposes of Vagabond, that’s perfect though, since you still need to be able to tell who’s who.  And it doesn’t hurt the illustration at all.  This is probably my favorite Musashi illustration from the entire book.

Similarly, my favorite portrait of Kojiro, with heavy ink brushwork.  This one is a lot more gestural than the Musashi illustration above.  This is closer to what I picture when I think of a sumi-e artbook.  But again, I wasn’t at all disappointed with the contents of this book.

Some of the illustrations are given a little color.  Not too often.  The occasional bold color helps break up all the black and white.

Anyway, more of the type of image I described above.

(Ugh.  Trust me, not having a scanner and Photoshop is bugging the crap out of me right now just as much as it is you.)

Some of the illustrations use a mix of gestural ink line, detail, and tone, too.  The use of tone is a little strange, but… you know.  Manga and all.  And I do love it when this technique is used in the manga itself.

Some of the illustrations are taken directly from the manga panels.  Still, they’re good in the context of the manga, so I don’t mind seeing them again.  Plus, Inshun is a good character to revisit.

I don’t even know what this technique is.  It’s great for conveying motion in the same gestural ink style.  It almost looks like you’d have to use a wire brush, or a very stiff brush, in order to get those regular square strokes.

Another thing about this book, and about Vagabond in general, is that there is a heavy emphasis on nature.  The above landscape is one of my favorites, since it really does use a minimalist style to convey as much about the landscape as possible.  But there’s still detail, and if you click to enlarge it, you can see all the tiny strokes it took to make the little elements and the planar differences and whatnot.  It’s pretty amazing.

Another tinted image, which uses both detail and perspective to great effect, and I love the way the sun shines through the trees.

Lots and lots of characters in landscapes, too.  This one is nicely tinted, which turns the image from the dark, depressing chapter illustration where Kojiro is being hunted to a more peaceful nature scene.  Another one of my favorites, and again, with a stunning amount of detail.

More people and landscapes, both living and dead.  Again, click on them to see loads and loads of detail.  Plenty of care went into drawing these.

If there’s anything better than an overhead/aerial perspective, especially during an intense man-to-man fight scene… well, I’ve never seen it.

Another thing Inoue can do like few others is provide a broad range of facial expressions for each character.  Here’s a page showing off the many moods of Matahachi’s Mom, and a small collage of Otsu.

And a big, genuinely happy grin from Jisai, who doesn’t have too much to smile about in the story.  That one’s worth clicking on to see the detail in the lines of all the various hairs and things, too.  Jisai was also an excellent portrayal of a broken down, poor old man.  He lived in the woods with nothing and was always a little smudged, with ratty clothes.  There wasn’t anything glamorous about him, and he was always drawn as such.

There’s also a few examples of important scenes from the manga condensed down, with the panels collaged into one or two double-page spreads, and one or two sketches too, as you would expect from an artbook.

While I was a little disappointed initially because it wasn’t exclusively ink paintings, there are few series that have black and white art that is worth examining as closely as Vagabond.  Most people are probably going to want to see the color artwork, if anything at all, but for anyone interested in this study, it’s definitely worth picking up.