Blade of the Immortal 20
Posted: May 22, 2011 Filed under: Blade of the Immortal Leave a comment »Hiroaki Samura – Dark Horse – 2008 – 26+ volumes
Okay. So, I won’t lie. I’m a big fan of the prison arc storyline here. When it leads to volumes like this, it’s worth anything that came before.
Just about everything I could possibly want in Blade of the Immortal is in this volume. Rin being a hero. A reunion between Rin and Manji. Rin finally beating the crap out of somebody. Manji fighting bad guys. Rin fighting bad guys. Someone going what appears to be full-on Lazarus. A brawl between several people in a cell, where some of the people are restrained and occasionally incapacitated and the whole thing is flooding. Actually, the flooding doesn’t happen until next volume. Shame on me for reading ahead, but most of the good stuff happens here.
Part of me suspects that Hiroaki Samura just thought of what the coolest situation for the characters would be, then wrote all the lead-up just to justify this. I don’t know how this volume can ever be topped.
There’s really too much to go into, and to talk it up would spoil it. All of it is good. Every page. But my favorite part, the unlooked-for action, is the confrontation between Asaemon and Manji. It’s not a fight I was expecting, and Asaemon makes for an interesting opponent, especially since… well, neither are fighting for their life, really, it’s more a matter of principle. That is, if by “not fighting for his life,” you can also include Manji’s wish not to be nailed to Asaemon’s wall, having his liver constantly removed. But Asaemon is a good character, the happy executioner, perfectly aware of everything that was going on and simply filling his role. He spoke up when things got too out of hand, and he had his own type of honor. I like him a lot, he’s a different sort of fellow, and I always thought he might be on Manji’s side if it came down to it. Sad, then, that it turned out this way, but it still makes for a really good fight.
Is there significance in the fact that he had 大 on his forehead through the latter half of the fight?
