The Spring 2021 Manga Guide

Stitch and the Samurai

What's It About? 

While fleeing the Galactic Federation, Stitch's spaceship malfunctions and he makes an emergency landing... not in Hawaii, but in sengoku-era Japan! Discovered by the brutal warlord Lord Yamato and his clan, Stitch's incomparable cuteness is no match for the battle-weary samurai, who decides to bring the "blue tanuki" home with him. Will Stitch's love of chaos turn into a formidable advantage for the samurai's influence? Or will his cute and fluffy form disarm the noble lord's stern façade?

Disney Manga: Stitch and the Samurai is drawn and scripted by Hiroto Wada and Tokyopop has released the first volume on April

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

Where was Stitch before he turned up in that animal shelter in Hawaii where he met Lilo? If you guessed “in feudal Japan hanging out with a warlord,” well…you probably already know about this manga? Because that's the premise of Hiroto Wada's Stitch and the Samurai, and it is surprisingly good. It takes for its premise that when Stitch first went on the run, he warped time and space and somehow ended up in a province of Japan during the warring states period. His crash-landing interrupted Lord Yamato's brutal plans to burn out his enemies by torching their fort (women and children notwithstanding), and the moment he claps eyes on what he calls a “blue raccoon,” Yamato is smitten. Now rather than wage war, all he wants to do is befriend his weird new pet.

If you've ever fallen madly in love with an animal, that's pretty darn relatable, even if Lilo and Stitch isn't your favorite Disney movie. Lord Yamato's boundless enthusiasm for Stitch and his desperate attempts to get the “tanuki” to trust him make for entertaining reading, especially if you've ever, for example, spent a month lying on your living room floor with your arm under the couch trying to win the trust of a feral cat. (It worked, if you're wondering.) While what the warlord really wants is to be able to pet Stitch's fluffy tummy, he also dreams of hand-feeding him and maybe even snuggles with the blue…animal. By the end of the book, he's actually getting much closer, in part because he's stopped acting like Stitch is an exotic pet and has begun to admit to both the alien and himself that he's drawn to Stitch because he sees in his longing for space a reflection of his own childhood. Lord Yamato was given as a hostage to a rival family when he was young, and Stitch's situation really speaks to his heart. It's at that point that he begins to offer Stitch toys and to teach him things like how to gather chestnuts, and he even tries to have his best machinists repair the spaceship. The results may be less than ideal, but Stitch can see that his heart is in the right place.

Despite taking the warring states period for its setting, this isn't a particularly bloody or violent book, and the action is more for laughs as Stitch conquers Lord Yamato's men. The art is a funny mixture of Stitch (and other aliens) looking like they were drawn by totally different artists on a traditional seinen-style samurai manga, and it works better than you might expect. That's basically my feelings about this book in a nutshell: it's unexpectedly good and an awful lot of fun.