What Is The Art of Blade of the Immortal?

Yes, and the English one is bigger than the Japanese one.

Samura's colour work was gathered in Japan in 2008 as Glittering Waves: Collected Illustrations from Blade of the Immortal. When Dark Horse brought the book west in June 2010 as The Art of Blade of the Immortal, editor Philip Simon did not simply translate it: the American edition adds a 32-page signature of material the Japanese book does not have, an introduction by Geof Darrow, and a translated afterword by Samura, in a 160-page hardcover at 9 by 12 inches.

The contents span the series' first decade, 1993 to 2004: the tankobon covers and chapter title art, posters and promotional paintings, and the pencil work underneath them, including close photographs of Samura at his desk. The exclusive English material gathers the illustrations Samura made for the Legend of the Sword Demon novel and the anime's DVD slipcases, and sets colourised versions of three pieces beside their originals, one of the few places a reader can watch a Samura drawing become a Samura painting.

Blade of the Immortal volume 11 Japanese cover, Afternoon KC — **VOLUME 11**Volume 11 of the Japanese tankobon, Afternoon KC. Samura painted all thirty covers himself, and they were never redesigned.

THE TWO EDITIONS

Tokyo 2008, Milwaukee 2010

Glittering Waves (2008)

The Japanese original: the collected illustrations as Kodansha issued them, drawn from the first eleven years of the series.

The Art of Blade of the Immortal (2010)

Dark Horse Books, on sale June 2, 2010. 160 pages, 9 by 12 inches, $29.99, ISBN 978-1-59582-512-4. Larger than the manga in every dimension, deliberately: the covers were painted as pictures and are printed as pictures.

The Darrow introduction

Geof Darrow, the American artist of Hard Boiled and The Matrix Comics, wrote the foreword after calling Dark Horse as a fan of the series. Simon has written that he simply exploited the friendship.

The unwritten sequel

In his afterword Samura hoped to make a second art book from the later years of the run. It never appeared, which makes this volume the only collected form of his Blade of the Immortal colour work, and the gallery on this site the covers' other home.

What Is The Art of Blade of the Immortal?

THE TWO EDITIONS

THE FIRST WORD