History ComicBook / UsagiYojimbo

** Usagi has a terrifying dream where he's possessed by Jei and kills all of his friends (apparently based on a possible KillEmAll ending for the series).

Gold Rush Games published ''Usagi Yojimbo Roleplaying Game'' using the Instant Fuzion game system and later Creator/SanguineGames published ''Usagi Yojimbo: Role-Playing Game'' using a variant of the Cardinal system used in ''TabletopGame/{{Ironclaw}}'' with the second edition using the TabletopGame/PoweredByTheApocalypse system.

%% * GettingCrapPastThe Radar: Due to overwhelming and persistent misuse, GCPTR is on-page examples only until 01 June 2021. If you are reading this in the future, please check the trope page to make sure your example fits the current definition.

* SmallTaxonomyPools: Only major/recurring characters get to have distinct species. Pretty much everyone else is just a cat or dog.

A video game for the UsefulNotes/{{Commodore 64}} called ''Samurai Warrior: The Battles of Usagi Yojimbo '' was released in 1988. A mobile game for iOS and Android was also released, ''Usagi Yojimbo: Way Of The Ronin''.

* StoryWithinAStory: Usagi's told two: "My Lord's Daughter" where he battles an army of ''oni'' to rescue his lord's daughter [[spoiler: his Lord Mifune didn't have a daughter]] and [[Literature/{{Momotaro}} "Momo-Usagi-taro"]] with himself as the legendary hero and ([[FurryConfusion interestingly]]) PartiallyCivilizedAnimal sidekicks, not anthropomorphic ones like himself (maybe because one of them's a pheasant and there aren't any bird-people). The ''Senso'' stand-alone also turned out to be one.

* ScarsAreForever: Usagi is consistently drawn with his scar from the battle at Adatachi Plain (even if other such scarring he acquires eventually heals). Katsuichi loses his eye and wears an eyepatch ([[RuleOfCool made from a sword guard]]) from that point on.

** Arguably Jei is one to Usagi himself, and Noriko is definetely one to Tomoe,

* EyeScream: In "The Mother Of Mountains", the mercenary known as The Orphanmaker loses both his eyes over the course of the story, Usagi pokes one out with his bare fingers when the Orphanmaker is grappling with him, and during the climax cuts the other one out with his sword, leaving him blind. He's such a JerkAss it's hard to feel sorry for hi, but ironically, it leads to BreakTheHaughty, as seen above.
* EyePatchOfPower: After losing his eye in the battle that makes Usagi think he's dead, Katsuichi Sensei covers it with a sword guard.

** As a samurai, Usagi is prepared to do so. During "Grasscutter", when Jei appeared to have Usagi on the ropes and stated his intention to kill him, the latter simply replied, "Such is karma."
** The Neko Ninjas motto is "a ninja's duty in life is death", and none of them have ever begged for mercy no matter how vile the ninja in question might be.

* FacingTheBulletsOneLiner: Chizu's brother had one [[spoiler: before [[TakingYouWithMe he blew up himself together with the boss of the Dragon Bellows Conspiracy.]]]] She thus replaced him as the head of the Neko Ninja. Invoked many times since by Chizu herself as their BadassCreed.

* FamilyUnfriendlyDeath: Don't let the [[BloodlessCarnage lack of blood]] or the [[ArtStyleDissonance style of the art]] fool you. The body count of this comic is frankly ''[[CharactersDroppingLikeFlies astonishing]]'', and most of the deaths are extremely graphic. Of particular note is the cruel capture and murder of poor, innocent [[GentleGiant Noodles]]. His only friends are kept back by corrupt lawmen while he is tortured, then [[ImpaledWithExtremePrejudice graphically run through with spears]].

* FourIsDeath: The quartet of assassins known as "Shi".

* FreudianExcuse: Tomoe's cousin is a total psychopath who casually kills peasants and enjoys inflicting suffering on others. However, she had a pretty unfair childhood. [[spoiler:Her mother had her through an affair with her husband's brother, aka Tomoe's father, making her Tomoe's half sister. Her legal father couldn't stand the sight of her knowing where she really came from and sent her off to live with her blood father, who refused to acknowledge her as his daughter due to the scandal it would make. She was always jealous of Tomoe who was well loved and well treated.]] Though, Noriko was still a psychopath even during her childhood, so it may have contributed to why she was hated by her own family. It's not fully explained.

* FutureBadass: Pretty much everyone has taken a level or two in ''Senso'': Jotaro is entrusted with a large part of the army, Gennosuke is a general, Noriyuki is a capable military leader, even Keiko managed to pick up a scar. The only exception is Jei of all people, who gets fried by a Martian death ray at random and then has no more relevance to the story [[spoiler:only appearing as a cameo implying that he finally possessed Keiko.]]

** Also in "Tomoe's Story," Tomoe's is made more clearly expressive in the framing story and in the original story, she comes out of the climactic fight that got her appointed Noriyuki's personnel much more scuffed up than in the original version.

* TheGreatSerpent: Lord Hibki is a giant Snake who is [[TheDragon second-in-command]] to the Big Bad, Lord Hikiji.

* HeirClubForMen: Tomoe is more skilled than her brother but didn't inherit the family dojo because she's a woman. Her father does acknowledge that she is by far the superior swordsman, but has no interest in wrecking the dojo's reputation in a futile attempt at singlehandedly changing everyone elses sexist attitudes.
* HiddenInPlainSight: In the acclaimed "Grasscutter" storyline, Usagi discovers the fabled lost sword whose owner can lay claim to being Emperor. Knowing that the fight for the sword could instigate a civil war, Usagi decides to take it to a temple where an exact replica of Grasscutter is on display for visitors. By switching the real sword for the fake, Usagi will have it kept safe while totally in the public eye.

* HonorBeforeReason: Reconstructed. Usagi has no problem using trickery, usually to help the underdog. Characters who mistake honor for weakness frequently come off the worse for it. Also played straight, averted, and subverted, depending on the character and occasion. For instance, if a character takes a stand in this series and says, "I am adamant!," you will know that ''nothing'', especially death threats, is going to make them change their mind.

* HorrifyingTheHorror: Ryoko is a witch who can mind-control others in huge quantities, even at vast ranges. Then she runs into Jei while remote-piloting her servant, and is appropriately horrified.

** Usagi's first love Mariko demanded that Usagi stay away from their home town and never tell Jotaro that Usagi is his real father, as Mariko didn't want to ruin the relationship between Jotaro and his step-father Kenichi, who Jotaro thinks is his real father. However, Mariko went on to tell Jotaro the truth anyway, which led to both Usagi and Jotaro struggling with whether to reveal their blood relationship to the other, both scared that the learning the truth would destroy the other's happiness.

* KarmicDeath: In ''The Fiend'', after murdering his author wife for being more famous than him (and blaming it on bandits), her husband's daimyo congratulates him on the success of his late wife's final book, and notes that her name will likely live on long after either of them are forgotten. He commits ritual suicide minutes later.
** Rodriguez, the European ambassador who had the daimyo he was in the court of force a tea ceremony master to commit seppeku for a minor slight, duels Usagi later in the issue. Usagi kills him with a wakishazi slash to the belly.

* KickThemWhileTheyAreDown: Noriko to Tomoe (twice), Noriko to the laborers.

** They're ''very'' durable: Usagi's descendant wields them in ''Space Usagi'' and only "arcane katanas" can be modified with AppliedPhlebotinum into AbsurdlySharpBlade[=s=]. The swords even used to bring Usagi into the future just long enough for the two Usagis to say hi and [[spoiler: give him a few goodies to take back so he won't get killed by ninjas]].
** There's also PublicDomainArtifact Grasscutter, which is at the very least an extremely well-made mundane sword, having laid at the bottom of the ocean for 500 years without losing it's edge or getting the least bit rusty. There's also some indication that it's divine heritage might be true, such as Jei being unable to corrupt it like he does with his other weapons.

* CreepyChild: Keiko, after Jei designates her as his "innocent" (acting like a witch's familiar). Although she's quite [[CheerfulChild cheerful]] about it, which, as Keiko cheerfully bids a polite farewell to the men Jei has just murdered, makes it all the eerier. She hasnt changed much personality-wise from when Jei first found her, but the way she never acknowledges the swathe of horror Jei is carving across their travels is very unsettling.

* CruelTwistEnding: The Teru Teru Bozu story has Usagi staying at a family's house where he makes friend with their young son and teaches him how to make the titular Teru Teru Bozu which one can place outside the house to ask the gods for better weather. That night, the house is attacked by a big monster that eats the boy's parents before [[spoiler:killing Usagi and attacking the boy.]] This turns out to just be a nightmare the kid had due to eating too many sweets Usagi gave him the previous night. Usagi makes him some stilts and they play together for a little while longer before Usagi goes on his way. A mostly light hearted and low stakes story. Except that night, it is storming and someone knocks on their door. The child runs to the door, thinking Usagi came back to get out of the rain. However, he opens it to find [[spoiler:Jei standing at the door.]]

* DefiantToTheEnd: Usagi is ''never'' one to do anything else when facing an enemy who seems to have the drop on him.

** Similarly, he doesn't like "foreigners" in general. Given that most of his experiences with them involve guns, tuberculosis, and an entitled Spanish AssInAmbassador who demanded to see a harmless tea master commit seppuku simply for his own entertainment, you can't really blame him.

** Tatami, a two-issue story arc in the IDW run, ends with the premium titular mats destroyed by ninja hired by Hikiji, but there's no concrete proof of this. The guards of the mats plan to commit ritual suicide in an attempt to allow their daimyo to save face for the visiting Shogun, as the mats had been planned for a tea ceremony in a state visit.
* DramaticIrony: Usagi knows that Jotaro is really his son. Jotaro learns from his mother that Usagi is really his father. Neither thinks the other knows (though the audience knows that ''both'' know), and both struggle with whether to tell the other the truth, as they both believe that doing so will destroy the other's happiness (Usagi doesn't want to destroy Jotaro's relationship with his step-father Kenichi, who his mother Mariko married. Jotaro doesn't want to make Usagi feel like he needs to settle down to raise Jotaro, as he knows Usagi feels that his place in life is on the road.)
* TheDrifter: As a consequence of the setting's backstory (the Shogun's Peace forcing all the great lords to disband most of their military forces), a lot of samurai are traveling 'the warrior pilgrimage'. This includes Usagi, Gen, Stray Dog and a number of others.

* DyingMomentOfAwesome: In "The Dragon Bellows Conspiracy," [[spoiler:Usagi, Gen, Zato-Ino, and a bunch of Neko ninjas led by Shingen attack the castle of Lord Tamakuro, who has been stockpiling black powder weapons. They do some damage, and rescue Tomoe, but the attack fails and they begin to retreat. But then Shingen, dying of gunshot wounds, uses the last of his strength to set fire to the back powder, annihilating himself and Tamakuro and ending the potential rebellion.]]

* CoolSword[=s=]: Less explicate than other examples, but Usagi's pair of swords are truly awesome. He first earns them as a prize, from Lord Mifune himself, for winning a kenjutsu tournament, and they're even [[NamedWeapons named Young Willow and Willow Branch.]] The swords are practically invincible considering they haven't been shown to have so much as a chip after all the things he's sliced with them, and in a few panels they're even shown to have cut into opponents swords during a BladeLock! Once he even sliced an ogre's club clean in half with some effort. In a series where it's stated over and over how a Samurai's swords are his soul, Usagi's never disappoints. The story ''Daisho'' shows the forging of the swords three centuries before Usagi's birth, making clear just how they have such admirable qualities and just what is at stake, should he ever lose them. Precious indeed.

* ArtisticLicenseHistory: The one big deviation history-wise is that guns and gunpowder seem to be unknown to this version of Japan until European contact, despite that they were already known centuries earlier due to proximity with China.

** Tamago is a friendly, [[PintsizedPowerhouse tiny]], tea-loving elderly wandering priest whose over-sized head is shaped like an egg complete with a crack scar/birthmark [[spoiler: he's also a senior member of Koroshi, the assassins guild, has done a YouHaveFailedMe at least once, and is yet another person who has it out for Usagi (nothing personal, it's just that he's really good at screwing up their plans)]].

** Gen's story ends with [[spoiler: Gen discovering that the swords he stole from Oda house's were his father's swords, Gen explain that the only way Oda could have obtained them were killing Gen's father.]]
** Lady Kiku's story ends with [[spoiler: her and Usagi alive but forced to separate, and Usagi not learning that she still cares about him years later.]]

** "Travels With Jotaro" ends with [[spoiler: Usagi and Jotaro being unable to compromise the others happiness by revealing they're father and son, even though they both really want to.]]

** Senso (which is not in the main canon) serves double duty for the story itself and for Space Usagi. [[spoiler:After piloting a robot and destroying the last alien walker, Usagi gets stabbed by the last remaining alien. Before he dies, he and Jotaro both learn that the other knew about their relationship as father and son, and he confesses his love to Tomoe. Then we see that the whole story was told by Usagi from Space Usagi to children, showing that he survived the events of his story and found another love in that canon's version of Mariko, who is pregnant.]]

** Mostly, it seems to be used in sequences where it has the maximum dramatic effect, such as the story arc where Usagi [[spoiler: was poisoned and began to [[FeverDreamEpisode hallucinate]] that he had become Jei's new incarnation, fighting Tomoe]]. The sudden, shocking appearance of so ''much'' blood drove home just how traumatic an experience this was for the protagonist.
** In most cases where blood is spilled, but Sakai wanted to keep gore down, he instead drew characters exhaling a cloud with a cartoonish skull (in some cases wit the haircut of the dying character) to symbolize death. The trick (possibly inspired by Stan's work with Creator/SergioAragones on Comicbook/GrooTheWanderer) is an iconic part of the series these days.

* BlueAndOrangeMorality: Jei. He's a demon who claims to do the work of the gods, and kills several evil people. He also kills innocent people whom he deems to be evil. He does spare at least two people whom he deems to be innocent.
** Jei's first meeting with Usagi is actually non-violent, initially. Both meet in an abandoned peasants house and agree to spend the night. Usagi is creeped out by Jei, but neither attempt to harm the other and Jei even explains his philosophy. When Jei is asleep, he seems to get a vision from the gods telling him that Usagi is evil, which started their animosity.

* CainAndAbel: [[spoiler: Noriko and Tomoe, although it's Noriko who gets killed, probably.]]

* CatsAreMean: While there are numerous characters that avert this, such as Tomoe Ame, the Neko Ninja clan serves the BigBad Lord Hikiji, Usagi, Gen, and Tomoe fight an Obakeneko in one chapter, and a few minor villains are cats, such as Arimura, Ryoko, and Rodriguez. And while Inazuma isn't a villain, she isn't exactly friendly either. The characters living up to this trope the most, however, are Noriko, EvilCounterpart to Tomoe Ame, and her cousin, who is a complete and utter {{Sadist}}, and Kagemaru, who betrayed Chizu and [[spoiler: turned the entire Neko Ninja clan against her.]]

* CoolSword[=s=]: Less explicate than other examples, but Usagi's pair of swords are truly awesome. He first earns them as a prize for winning a tournament and they're even [[NamedWeapons named Young Willow and Willow Branch.]] The swords are practically invincible considering they haven't been shown to have so much as a chip after all the things he's sliced with them, and in a few panels they're even shown to have cut into opponents swords during a BladeLock! Once he even sliced an ogre's club clean in half with some effort. In a series where it's stated over and over how a Samurai's swords are his soul, Usagi's never disappoints. The story ''Daisho'' shows the swords forging three centuries before Usagi's birth, making clear just how they have such admirable qualities and just what is at stake, should he ever lose them. Precious indeed.

* AmbiguouslyEvil: The Lord of Owls. Like Jei, he operates on BlueAndOrangeMorality, unlike Jei, he has no quarrel with Usagi, and most of his victims attacked him first. However in one instance he laid waste to a group of Samurai... who were jokingly asking if he wanted to drink with them, even trying to de-escalate the situation when the Lord of Owls drew his sword and declared his intention to kill them. The Lord of Owls presents himself as a sort of Grim Reaper like figure who kills those whose time is up, like those samurai and the other bandits he's fought.

** While Usagi is almost always friendly and largely treats people equally regardless of social class, he is not afraid of pulling societal rank on peasants if they prove uncooperative or disrespect him.

As one of the more famous and successful examples of creator-owned comics, ''Usagi Yojimbo'' has had a number of different publishers. Starting out in the anthology ''[[ComicBook/AlbedoErmaFelnaEDF Albedo Anthropomorphics]]'', it later moved to Fantagraphics Books where it started its ongoing title. It was then published by Eastman and Laird's Mirage Studios for a time, before moving on to Creator/DarkHorseComics. Collected editions are available, with the first seven books published by Fantagraphics and the rest by Dark Horse. [[note]]Though the Mirage issues, which were originally published in colour, are in B&W as the colour plates were lost at some point.[[/note]] In March of 2018, the series moved to a series of miniseries, with both the total numbering and the Dark Horse numbering listed in the indices. And most recently, in 2019, [[ChannelHop the series moved to]] Creator/IDWPublishing, renumbered yet again and being published in colour.

* {{Kitsune}}: The ''character'' named Kitsune is just a 'person' who appears foxlike. A couple of kitsune in the Japanese myth sense have appeared, with the ability to switch from non-anthropomorphic fox forms into fox-humanoids, but they are generally (though not invariably) villains.

* LoadsAndLoadsOfCharacters: Oh, boy. Easily into the hundreds of characters just from the ones who are ''named''.

* {{Expy}}: A TMNT crossover in the comics had a rat sage named Kakera with a suspicious resemblance to Splinter who summons the Turtles through magic. [[BilingualBonus "Kakera" is Japanese for "splinter" or "fragment".]]

[[http://kidscreen.com/2018/02/06/unleashing-usagi/ On February 6, 2018, a full animated series was officially announced as being in development]] and in July 2020 it was announced as ''Samurai Rabbit: The Usagi Chronicles'' [[https://www.animationmagazine.net/streaming/stan-sakais-usagi-yojimbo-embarks-on-new-adventure-with-netflix-series-samurai-rabbit-the-usagi-chronicles/ on Netflix]]. Rather than an adaptation of the comic, it will be a future-set series about a descendant of Usagi, much like the once-proposed ''Space Usagi'' series. [[HistoryRepeats Everything old is new again]]. Hopefully, the Turtles can make an appearance.

* WarIsHell: born into the samurai class, Usagi grew up with romantic notions of martial honor and glorious battle; these were burned out of him early in his tutelage with Katsuichi, who harbored a traumatized ''ashigaru'' (foot soldier) fleeing from the slaughter of his army, then showed the young Usagi the battlefield in its aftermath.

* EvilOldFolk: The Assassin's Guild and the Neko Ninja clan both employ the elderly as assassins, to pretty good effect when Usagi isn't involved.

** At one point, Inazuma realizes that the operator of a lonely roadside restaurant has slipped poison into her tea so he can collect her bounty. She terrifies the man into drinking the tea, watches him die in agony, and then [[ActuallyPrettyFunny pays for her meal]] before she departs. After all, she's not a ''thief.''

** As tolerant as Usagi can be, he's still amazed in "The Hidden" upon learning that the Christians worship an executed criminal (albeit an innocent one). And while he's particularly hostile to the Japanese Christians in hiding, when he and Inspector Ishida find one, Usagi thinks that he should be arrested since Christianity is outlawed, and continues to think so even after Ishida reminds him that the man would most likely be executed if brought in. Ishida on the other hand is very sympathetic to the Christians' plight, [[spoiler:which makes sense considering he ''is'' one.]]