Blade of the Immortal Deluxe Volume 1 Hardcover – October 27, 2020

Some of the best lines and shading in all of manga, and a really cool story. Sturdy book with high quality paper.

This was good got as a gift good read good

So heads up I'm not really into manga or anime. I'm mainly into comics. I like things that feel a bit grounded and don't seem totally unbelievable that I feel like I'm drugs reading a book sober. That being said though I like Gundam thunderbolt, and I'm at volume 3 of the berserk Deluxe editions. Fantastic read by the way. Just want to give some back story on whether or not this could be worth the buy for you. When Dark Horse puts effort into collecting things into a hardcover deluxe format it only means one thing.... This story is loved by many and is extremely good. I've never read Blade of the Immortal before so I had high hopes going in. I wasn't disappointed at all! People that are complaining about it reading like a regular graphic novel really need to get over it. Seriously. The guy who wrote it actually came back and re-did a lot of this so it wouldn't just be mirrored and it could be read by westerners in the way we read. A LOT of time and effort went into this and you can tell. The guy is a genius. At times the black and white art can get distorted and I cant quite tell what is happening. Maybe that's just the beauty of it though. Its rough, its brutal, its intense, its messed up and I didn't really mind as the majority of the time I can see the gore and bloodshed on full display. It started out slow for me and I put it down after a bit thinking it wasn't for me. When I picked it back up after dinner one night I couldn't stop. I reached the end and it was already midnight. Okay so why should you be interested? If you like gun slinging western movies with a badass main character you'll like this for sure. I like how it stays grounded and on a believable level without it really being believable. You almost pity those that are about to be slaughtered. The respect given by others just sets the mood and feels.... chaotic but controlled. If you like extreme violence and sword fights this is the book for you!!!

Excellent product quality and amazing story.

Most underrated manga of all time.

Fantastic version worth the additional money. I own the full Dark Horse series and am a big fan of the story and art (Hiroaki Samura) and this version, be you new to collecting or a hardcore collector, is a must have. Comic sized but in a hardback, I will be purchasing the remaining volumes.

Well, let's get into it:Pros:- Great cover, simple, and has an amazing texture to it, it's outrageously soft and smooth.- The cover art, while a bit small, very nice quality (other Deluxe Editions by DH usually have an icon for the series, Berserk having the brand, Hellsing a cross, so I assume they wanted to use a Manji but avoided it to prevent any miscommunication, still, one of Manjis blades would have been cool).- Pages are stellar and beautiful, not blurry or anything, greatly done.Con(s):- It's formatted like a western book- It has western SFXTo elaborate on this, the front cover is the left cover of the book, not the right one like all manga (with a few exceptions for western manga before a certain time period), and it reads left to right, not right to left. This wouldn't be a problem if this was 1999, but it's not. Even when looking at the other deluxe editions done by Dark Horse (Hellsing and Berserk), they're formatted properly, and read right to left (Berserk even came out before BotI and reads normally).The sound effects are also westernized. This might seem more like a nitpick, but again, normally, at least nowadays, you'd have a sound effect on the image, then a translator's note below it telling you what it means. Imagine reading something like JoJo and Dio, or any other villain, shows up and "ゴゴゴ" is replaced with "Menacing" looping across the page, it'd be super weird. On this release, you'll see stuff like "thwap" and "whoosh" and it's kind of weird, while, again, their other releases don't do this, it's literally as if they just had their ancient scans, they cleaned them up, and compiled them instead of just doing this amazing series justice for once in it's printed life. But again, this is just a personal nitpick.What's most infuriating, is that this isn't the first time this manga has been released in the west, again if it was 1999, and I had no idea how manga would be read, or how they're supposed to look like, this wouldn't be a problem. But it isn't the 90's anymore. This series was originally released on paperback, then on omnibuses, and now this. Most of the original printings have been out of print for years now and this is supposed to be the best version to purchase. If Dark Horse had the manga scans, they could have made sure they read properly like any collector would want, and it's disappointing because their other releases do such a great job at providing an amazing compilation of volumes to fans, yet they didn't with this, it's a huge letdown.Is it still worth it? Yeah, if you don't mind the odd reading style (unless you're accustomed to it), which might be a bit hard for more modern manga fans to get used to right away.I just hope they fix this for the future releases instead of using an old archive (at least, I assume that's what they did), and have the cover be on the correct side. For the pages to read as they should and for the SFX to be as it should be, just iconic and part of the background.

Awesome quality, bought the whole volume. 10/10, thanks!