“Beautiful” and “deadly” are two words that seem fated to go hand-in-hand in most manga. They certainly apply to Makie the geisha, a woman of both uncommon loveliness and unearthly skill with her choice of weapons. A woman that gorgeous and with so many talents, though, shouldn’t have such a desolate expression all the time—but that’s only because she knows firsthand how all things, herself included, are terribly impermanent. And now she has been commanded by her lover Anotsu to seek out and kill Manji, the ronin condemned to take a thousand evil lives before he himself will be permitted to die.

Welcome to Dreamsong, the third volume of Hiroaki Samura’s Blade of the Immortal, for my money the best comic running apart from one of Dark Horse’s other titles, Berserk (which I need to get caught back up with one of these days). It’s not just the unmistakable art style or the show-stopping characters or the gut-level storytelling—it’s the fact that you’ve got all this side by side in the same book, and none of them comes at the expense of the other. It’s all of a piece.