Click to Subscribe
‘Pity The Last’
Lone Wolf and Cub #2: Pitiful Osue by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima
© 2014 James LaFond
FEB/28/14
1987 First Comics, with the usual strong introduction by Frank Miller and an afterword by Rick Oliver
The story begins from the viewpoint of Osue, meaning the ‘lowest’ or ‘last’ of a housemaid’s servants—the lowest slave of a domestic slave. I actually considered titling this review ‘Housemaid from Hell’. Mrs. Mura, the vicious bitch who runs the house of Master Takizawa, the local Watchman of the Han Clan, is worse than a bitch on wheels—a bitch that wishes she had wheels! It is very cool that Kazuo and Goseki show something of how a household in feudal Japan worked. It also puts the women of Japan in a less passive light than we are accustomed to. Dude, lookout for that hairpin!
Lone Wolf and Cub, it seems to me, is about the soul-crushing hierarchies we are trapped within. The Lone Wolf, Itto Ogami, the ‘Baby Cart Assassin’ is literally the only man to stand outside the hierarchy of his land. He does so because the hierarchy betrayed him, and we identify with him because hierarchy has betrayed us all. This comic team nails the loner as a human archetype—the antihero. I see Itto as something of a Japanese Solomon Kane.
Don’t be too ready for the samurai bodies to start heaping up, because, in this issue—only two into the series—Itto is deathly ill, sick with fever and helpless. The story is carried by his toddler son, Daigoro—a badass, topknotted, diaper-wearing, wakisashi-wielding somebody with ‘life-death eyes’.
James Anderson’s Son
the man cave
‘Action with Intent’
eBook
book of nightmares
eBook
taboo you
eBook
blue eyed daughter of zeus
eBook
logic of force
eBook
by the wine dark sea
eBook
predation
eBook
triumph
eBook
son of a lesser god
eBook
on combat
eBook
the greatest lie ever sold
eBook
night city
eBook
honor among men
eBook
winter of a fighting life
eBook
masculine axis
eBook
america the brutal
eBook
under the god of things
eBook
within leviathan’s craw
eBook
the fighting edge
eBook
all-power-fighting
eBook
the greatest boxer
eBook
let the world fend for itself
eBook
the combat space
eBook
your trojan whorse
eBook
song of the secret gardener
eBook
sorcerer!
eBook
the gods of boxing
eBook
when you're food
eBook
menthol rampage
eBook
broken dance
eBook
barbarism versus civilization
eBook
z-pill forever
eBook
logic of steel
eBook
wife—
eBook
orphan nation
eBook
the lesser angels of our nature
eBook
the first boxers
eBook
on the overton railroad
eBook
into leviathan’s maw
eBook
fiction anthology one
eBook
cracker-boy
eBook
the sunset saga complete
eBook
thriving in bad places
eBook
the year the world took the z-pill
eBook
dark, distant futures
eBook
advent america
  Add a new comment below:
Name
Email
Message