Review: ‘Blade Of The Immortal’ Deluxe Edition Vol 9 Cuts Deep

Welcome to the table,

A while back, I was reading A History of Modern Manga and it really pushed me to get outside of my comfort zone when it came to Eastern comics.

One of the titles I came across that caught my attention is the Blade of the Immortal series. The series is set during the mid-Tokugawa Shogunate period, that’s kinda around the same time as the Boston Tea Party or the starting of the rumblings of the British Industrial Revolution. The story follows Manji, a cursed samurai, who has to kill 1,000 evil men so he can regain his mortality and can end his life of misery and pain.

It’s heavy subject matter, and unlike most offerings, I did not have the luxury of jumping in from the beginning. When Volume 9 of the Dark Horse Deluxe Edition slid across my desk I was a little worried about jumping into a series this far along.

Written and illustrated by Hiroaki Samura, the work is beautiful. It’s moody and full of energy with gallery-worthy panels and quiet moments that build tension punctuated by bursts of action that seem to leap off the page. It’s easy to see why Blade of the Immortal is a well-loved classic in the samurai genre.

The story is very somber and full of sorrow. There is no joy in these pages. It’s a story of vengeance and bloodshed and survival. Even in victory, there is a weight that feels almost oppressive. The heaviness of it all feels like it sets a tone through the 600+ pages of this deluxe offering and many times I felt myself sitting very still and trying to be very quiet.

There is an atmospheric weight to this story that pulls you in. With the layouts of panels on the page, there are times you feel less like someone reading a book and more like a disembodied observer of the events as they play out.

It can be tough to jump into a story already in progress but I am sure long-time fans of the series are going to love the treatment of the material in this volume. New to the series readers will more than likely get hooked and seek out the other volumes

Until next time, Blade of the Immortal was originally published in Kodansha’s Monthly Afternoon from June 1993 to December 2012. Wild to think all these years later this book still has some of the freshest and most well-constructed action sequences I have seen on a page. If you are a fan of swordfights and martial arts you really should give this a try.