[Vagabond] is back! [Takehiko Inoue] no longer in hiding!

astronautcowboy3

I've been married for just over a year, and I'm fairly certain that in that time not a single new chapter of Vagabond has been released (let alone a trade paperback). Today, however, I stumbled upon this face in the convenience store near the school I teach at. (Note: I thoroughly apologize for linking to a Twitter post instead of to the picture itself, but I don't know how to direct link to it.) My gasp when I saw the magazine scared the construction workers that were reading porn during their lunch breaks.

It looks like Vagabond is finally back, and whatever severe mental breakdown Inoue-san was going through is now over. Every third Thursday of the month, Vagabond will inch a little bit closer to actually being completed.

For anyone that is new to Vagabond, it's a series by Inoue Takehiko about the life of Miyamoto Mushashi. It's based on the novel Musashi by Yoshikawa Eiji. Hopefully these Wikipedia links will be enough to fill you in on everything.

I finished reading Musashi earlier this year, and in my opinion Vagabond is way better. It takes a lot of liberties with the source material, but the original story is not meant to be an accurate depiction of Musashi's life either. The novel was written in the early 1900s as a work of fiction, not a biography, so that Inoue has made the story more exciting, and minor characters become key players that will (literally) bring tears to your eyes only speaks to his abilities as a writer and artist.