Path Of the Assassin Volume 1: Serving In The Dark (v. 1)
By Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima.
Published by Dark Horse 320 pages. 2006. $9.95
Certainly I complain about my lack of time, and how often it gets devoured by certain activities, but I do enjoy my most . All right I might be a fiend on some things, but reading across the board is definitely an activity I use to develop my skills. So with the over saturation of the market in terms of any product released, it is definitely more important to find and locate a genre as one would appreciate it.
I read Path of Assassins vol 1 recently, and definitely this is going to be one for a niche within a niche. I spoke with the librarian, and she mentioned that she consistently never sees this type of manga getting taken out, so I borrowed it out of curiosity.
Path of the Assassin is about Hattori Hanzo who is a young ninja charged with protecting Tokugawa Ieyasu. Historically these are two key figures in Japanese history, but also please wipe from your mind the bishonen look to them from video games. (My personal experience, you might have seen another version of these two characters.)
So why would you want to maybe check out this book?
- Support the comic/graphic novel industry. It is published by Dark Horse, so appreciate that a comic book publisher can actually be also supporting the manga fan groups as well.
- Is a samurai/historical fan already, and want to see another perspective of these historical figures.
- Want to experience reading a different type of genre from the regular ones that you would read.
- Not sure why, but reading this book reminds me of Takehiko Inoue works, so if you like the artwork of Vagabond then this is an earlier publication type. It is all about the bushido code.
- I love how small this book was, definitely the size of normal Japanese publication, so it would fit any of Japanese book covers, and is a pocket book.
So I am going to stop off this post, and ask again are there any fans other than Japanese men for this type of genre? Not every thing is moe or cute girls, so why not get into the gritty days of yore with samurai and code of honors then.