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Premier Mounts
After twenty-some odd volumes, and lord knows how many eons, most should be amply acquainted with dark horse's Blade of the Immortal releases. The impeccable image quality, the satisfying heft, the weird cut-and-paste methodology for reversing the page order. At the end of the book you'll find a glossary of terms (nice, if repetitive), another of Samura's discussions of in-manga weaponry and an "ad" for a nonexistent Blade of the Immortal gal game (freaky).
I remember reading a foreword, written by Charles Schultz for some Calvin & Hobbes collection or another. In it Schultz praised Bill Watterson's artistic splashes of water and Calvin's dinner-roll shoes. "Bill's art is fun to look at," he said, or something to that effect. "Comics are a visual art; people forget how important it is that they be fun to look at." At the time I thought it was faint praise. Not any longer. Kiyohiko Azuma's art is also fun to look at. Yotsuba's unromanticized childishness and the adeptness with which he filters the world through her eyes indicate genuine writing chops, and his skill with combining innocence and working humor is nothing short of unnatural, but the true reason Yotsuba&! functions as a graphic novel fountain of youth, despite its own advanced years? Kiyohiko Azuma's art is fun to look at.
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