Vagabond is perhaps the very epitome of a great manga. It has everything: action, suspense, excitment, drama and even a little romance - everything that is packed into Eiji Yoshikawa's amazing original story.

That's not to say it is to everyone's tastes. While I personally love Takehiko Inoue's drawings, the imagery at times is very graphic, bordering on grotesque at times. Limbs, guts, heads fly off in the heat of battle, the drawings are literally so good it's sickening. If blood is not really your thing, you might be better leaving this on the shelf.

For those who don't mind a bit of blood however, read on, because while Vagabond at first glance just seems to be yet another manga based on the era of the samurai, this manga has a great deal of depth that literally sucks the reader in.

For example, in countless manga involving fights (and in particular, American comic books as well) the reader is presented with a rather generic range of characters - the good guys... and the bad guys. This isn't the case with the characters that appear in Vagabond however. The characteristics of people inhabiting the world of Vagabond, their emotions, desires, despairs, fears etc. are all painstakingly realised that Vagabond on a whole seems to be a lavishly painted picture. All characters have their reasons for what they do, they all have both good and bad elements to their character which only further adds to the realism that the drawings provide.

In your stock-standard fighting story the death of the "bad guys" is inevitable, and one does not stop to ponder this into too much detail. However, in Vagabond when Musashi cuts someone down both Musashi and the reader are left to think and question the "correctness" of his actions. You really feel for the deaths of those that fall. As Takuan, the monk appearing in the story, says, all people killed by Musashi were just that, people. They are people with families, wives, children, pets, they are people who had hopes and dreams, or people who just somehow lived day to day.

However the real reason Vagabond is a favourite manga of mine is because of the main story thread, the growth of Musashi himself from a reckless 17 year old youth who plunges directly into the battle of Sekigahara seeking unparalled strength, to a well rounded young adult who learns how to pick his battles.

The contrast between Matahachi and Musashi is beautifully done. Matahachi and Musashi, two friends, start the manga off on the same footing and set off to be one thing -"Tenka Musou" 天下無双 ('the best in the land'). However Matahachi and Musashi soon walk down separate paths to acheive this goal. Matahachi chooses to pursue frivolous momentary pleasures, while Musashi instead chooses to devote himself to bettering himself.

Both make mistakes and suffer setbacks along the way, and both have their own ways of dealing with this - Matahachi digs himself into further into trouble while Musashi rises above the setbacks he faces and strengthens himself to unbelivable proportions.

After surviving numerous duels to the bitter end and overcoming many internal conflicts (the decision to leave his one true love, Otsu to pursue the life of the sword), only one swordsman still stands in Musashi's way...

Sasaki Kojiro - a deaf and dumb swordsman who literally lives for the sword...

While the story does drag at times (the Yoshioka arc), on a whole Vagabond is packed full of both emotion and gut-wrenching sword battles. It's relatively short on dialogue, but the images Inoue presents speak volumes. A picture is really worth a thousand words and this manga is a manga that attests to this. If only other manga could be this deep as well. Every single volume of the manga really leaves the reader pondering about what they've read for a long time after the manga has been put down.

Put simply, there is not a manga that I could recommend more.