Niche audience for Path of Assassins!

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.
Killing under command!

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.

Author: Linda

Linda is a life long fan of anime, and dabbles in a lot of things. She writes with a tentative neutral voice.. and as for that three year anime blogging mark, she tries to defy that as she is gaining a voice in other mediums ie: Twitter. Find her at other places online. "They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance." -Terry Pratchett

4 thoughts on “Niche audience for Path of Assassins!

  1. I am a fan of samurai shows, the first one i saw was ruroini kenshin, since then i had seen and like most of them, yes even afro samurai, but the thing is iam not a manga reader due the fact that i dont like to read anything, iam more visual thats why i love anime, if the anime comes out i will be supporting, but i join your call all the samurai story and manga lovers please support this, so it will eventually came on anime too.
    P.S By the way i love also shigurui , do you know if a second season is in the works, too bad that madhouse often dont do second parts, (T_T sniff…claymore anyone, i want te second season)

    1. Thanks for the comment ManuOtaku. As fans, it is definitely great to support the industry. Path of Assassins is a classic title, so I doubt there is going to be an anime from this title. It is more of a pictorial look at the history of two influential figures in Japanese history. I have actually never seen Shiguri, but if there is anything else to see from this samurai genre, there is also the live action films, live action dramas. Lone Wolf and Cub definitely is a title that influenced Rurounin Kenshin.. so you can see if you can find that title.

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