Hunter Ninja Bear: Provenance

Okay look folks the name ain’t rocket science. Hunter. Ninja. Bear. It’s a thoroughly ridiculous concept. It’s PERFECT. What’s in the 360 page book far exceeded my expectations, giving a gripping tale about taboos, spirituality, and vengeance.

And it all begins with something that seems totally ridiculous on its face:

This tale offers a fair warning from the people past, built upon these simple rules:

Hunter beats bear

Ninja beats hunter

Bear beats ninja

To understand the hunter is to witness true love slaughtered and brothers brutally slain.

To fully understand the ninja is to watch a legacy of honor systematically destroyed and shamed.

To fully understand the bear is to hear the primal scream’s last breath, choking on its own blood.

My first thought was "Dixon, lay off whatever you're smoking. I just want to see hunters, ninjas, and bears kill each other, not whatever this nonsese is". Not gonna lie, that really puzzled me. I mean that’s practically incomprehensible. What in the hell was Dixon talking about, and why would he put it at the beginning of a story so manifestly ridiculous??? And to be clear, I still roll my eyes at the title. Yeah, I’m a grouch. Sue me.

Put a pin that a moment, willya?

The set up’s simple: a group of Japanese villagers defile a shrine to a bear spirit. Bears appear out of nowhere and slaughter the village… except for one ninja, who swears an oath of vengeance to a god. He then leaves to recruit a team to help him take down the monstrous bears.

Yeah, it sounds ridiculous, but Hunter Ninja Bear takes the premise straight and MAKES you do it too. The bears are terrifying forces of nature, and I lost all sympathy for them almost immediately. I’d hesitate to call the bears evil, but they sure are a legit threat. I never thought I’d be happy to see bear cubs die, but man, this book REALLY pushes the menace hard. Children and women are torn apart on the page. It’s grim.

Yes, there’s another G word I could have used.

If you didn’t chuckle sit with it a minute. 

The backdrop is the era of the Gold Rush. Americans are flocking west in hopes of a quick buck. Japan is modernizing. Chinese are flocking to California. The mythic may still be real… but hardly anyone cares anymore. Thematically there’s a lot of grieving over the creeping loss of spirit in the world. Not necessarily a nostalgia, but an admission that modernizing didn’t fix any of humanity’s problems. Obviously this isn’t a foremost quality of the work, but this low-key grief is part of what makes the story work! Chuck Dixon finds his moments as often as he can and I think he gets the balance between brooding and bloody just right. I’ll be reverse engineering Dixon’s methods into my games, cause they really work!

All that’s well and good, but this sorta story lives and dies because of the characters; if they don’t take the premise seriously there’s absolutely no reason for the reader to. And on this front Hunter Ninja Bear absolutely delivers. All the stakes are personal, intimate. Every last panel is used to economical effect, always commenting on the characters at play. Dixon is a master at his craft, and the characters is where he shines the brightest. I really don’t want to spoil it for you: Dixon really does a phenomenal job, particularly with Little Heart, who could have been done wrong really easily.

And how could anyone ignore the art??? It’s gorgeous! The coloring doesn’t feel tacked on here, like it does to me in a lot of comics, but was made with color truly in mind. The page composition flows really nicely; I never once got lost, and all my squint tests revealed good storytelling. It’s not Eisner, by any stretch, but it gets the job done and well. I didn't get lost and it's pretty. 

I’m spending my penultimate paragraph to write more about that weird spiel Dixon put at the front of this book. The rest of this review has attempted to indicate that Dixon lives up to the front page. I’ve been letting that page sit with me awhile now, and it keeps making me come back to this comic to see where I can find more of it. Dixon’s discussion on grief not being solved by “progress” has left me with a lot to think on about pre-modern concepts of morality and religion. One cannot cut out the brutality of the world, merely misplace and lie about it. And that’s it. 

I originally backed this comic because of Dixon’s name and the cheap price: 30 bucks for 12 issues is a steal these days! I got a lot more than that. Yeah I got ridiculously awesome battles and gore, but I got the things that make that sorta thing actually great: theme, characters, and story. I’ve no idea when volume two is coming out, but I am definitely watching for it, as well as Fenom Comics, just in general. If this is representative of their work in general I am so in.