The Art of Blade of the Immortal

by Hiroaki Samura

Hiroaki Samura's Blade of the Immortal epic is a unique, expertly paced manga series that mixes Edo-era samurai grudge matches with anachronistic punk attitudes and mannerisms. It's also one of the longest-running manga series in the U.S.! Samura's stirring tale of a warrior's search for redemption and a young girl's quest for revenge has taken the world by storm, winning numerous awards across the globe and spawning an anime series and a novel spinoff. In Dark Horse's The Art of Blade of the Immortal, Hiroaki Samura's lush color paintings, detailed line work, and selected story pages and chapter breaks are on display in an oversized, 9" x 12", hardcover collection. This Dark Horse edition also includes an exclusive section with thirty-two extra pages of artwork, an introduction by acclaimed artist Geof Darrow (Hard Boiled), and a translated afterword by Samura.

Genres: Manga, Art, Japan

160 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Hiroaki Samura ( 沙村広明) is a Japanese cartoonist and illustrator. He is best known for writing and illustrating the manga Blade of the Immortal (1993-2012). Among his other manga series Die Wergelder (2011-2018) and Wave, Listen to Me!, the latter serialised since 2014.

Reviews

[Patty]

Eventually, I hope to review all the graphic novels in the series, but I want to re-read them--I've been a fan ever since Dark Horse began publishing this series many years ago and originally collected them in comic issue format. Seeing this collection of his original artwork made me realize how many of those comic covers were "doctored" (digitally colored) by Dark Horse staff, so I greatly appreciated seeing his original, unaltered artwork a lot!

[Parka]

(More pictures at parkablogs.com)

This is actually the English translated edition of the Japanese art book 艶浪「無限の住人」画集 (ISBN 4063647234) published back in 2008.

This hardcover edition published by Dark Horse features an additional 32 pages of artwork. That's over 150 pieces of samurai art.

If you like the pencil and ink covers by Hiroaki Samura, then this book is for you. It contains primarily the covers (up to manga volume 17), other coloured illustrations, the chapter break splash pages and some inked panels. Everything's about twice the size of the manga illustrations. This is a pretty big book.

The reproduction is pretty good, especially for colour illustrations where you can see the texture of the canvas showing beneath the paint. About half the book is in pencils. Unfortunately, there aren't any rough sketches or comic layouts.

If you're a reader or collector of Blade of the Immortal comics, then you already know what to expect.

Nice book for the fans.

Oh, this book is also much cheaper than the Japanese edition.

[Kirstie]

If you have already read my review on the manga series as a whole then you know I think each individual panel is a piece of artwork in its own right, so when I heard there was an artbook I was tempted to say 'isn't each volume an artbook' but I knew it would be full colour versions of the cover art and title pages.
This book does not disappoint. This large-sized hard-cover immediately became one of the prize pieces of my collection. They even take care with double-page spreads to split them so the join of the image is not lost in the binding as with many artbooks. Some of the pictues are full colour and others are pencil/charcoal shaded works, but every single piece displayes Samura-sama's incredible talent. It even includes a few enlarged panels and the odd shot of Samura-sama's hand working on a piece(pages 32-33 and 114-115 for those who want to skip straight to them). Look for page 34 where there is a photograph of a woman with an image of Rin painted on her back Yakuza tattoo-style.
The amazing artwork fills me with inspiration every time I look at them, even pieces I have seen countless time over the last decade. It was worth every cent it cost - and the cost was not as high as I expected.

[Lady Entropy]

I like this author, and his tales, even if the story itself isn't particularly engaging and is sometimes silly. The art in here is nice, but not spectacular -- I wound up liking his splash pages in the manga better.