Review by Karl Verhoven
Vagabond is a fictional accounting of Miyamoto Musashi’s life, and this volume opens with a frenzied action showing just how capable Japan’s most highly regarded samurai is, even in his youth. What was supposed to be an ambush of a single man becomes a slaughter.
Musashi wrote his own autobiography, but Takehiko Inoue draws heavily from Eiji Yoshikawa, whose Musashi employed plenty of dramatic speculation in filling in gaps for an action spectacular.
In his home village in his younger days Musashi was known as Shinmen Takezō. He returned there in Vagabond Vol. 1 to deliver some upsetting news, but before doing so was part of a rebellion against the local lord, making him a wanted man. He’s skilled enough to avoid or defeat the local troops and their incompetent leader, but now faces his own doubts, smart enough to realise “in the end I’ll be cut down too, that’s all there is”. This honest self-assessment is accompanied by panels of crows feeding on corpses.
Before reading anything, the quality of Inoue’s art is obvious. Vagabond features immaculate storytelling featuring beautifully drawn and easily distinguished people with visual personalities. The sample art is a largely inconsequential page in the search for Takezō, but stop to admire the work ethic. There’s no need for the detail in the second and third panels, yet Inoue provides it anyway, leading to a more attractive looking page, and instead of close-up faces in the following panel (this reads from right to left), full figures are supplied. Inoue never takes the easy option, always considering what’s decorative in addition to being functional, meaning there’s so much beauty in these pages. The reproduction, incidentally, is a little sharper when this material is combined with the previous book and Vagabond Vol. 3 in the first VizBig edition.
Having introduced Takezō and his ways, Vagabond expands the cast with this volume. His mate Matahashi’s former fiancee Otsū has a large role, vengeful and lashing out, but conflicted, and interesting new character Takuan arrives. He’s more cunning and thoughtful than the thugs Takezō has outwitted to date, and is responsible for the most memorable chapter in which Takezō is forced to reflect on his past and who he is.
It’s all very clever, a transformative arc changing the wild Takezō into the samurai Musashi, although that won’t fully occur until the next volume. It also moves Vagabond from the perfectly acceptable action drama into something with greater depth and spirituality. Couple that with the astounding art and it’s shaping up into a compelling series.
