We are all aware that the world at large has embraced a fair number of American cultural innovations, baseball and basketball and jazz, for example. Yet few of these inventions can claim to have been so ambivalently received at home as the comic book.

    The early American masterpieces of comic art, such as George Herriman's Krazy Kat and Windsor McKay's Little Nemo, demonstrated to the world the vast artistic potentiality of a medium which combined illustration and storytelling in a completely unified format.

    While European and Asian audiences were embracing the comic book as a medium of expression adaptable to all ages and subjects, in the United States the comic book increasingly came to be seen as something essentially juvenile. The push to protect young minds, which so marked the Mccarthy era, found the American comic book industry ready to blunt anticipated attacks on itself by imposing a form of self censorship, the Comics Code, which insured that comics, as an art form, would, like its superhero characters, hung in the limbo of a perpetual pre-adolescence free from moral complexity and sophisticated themes.

    When the American comic trade, thanks to a group of brilliant new writers and artist like Frank Miller, determined to rescue the medium they loved from its self imposed coma, they naturally looked abroad for inspiration. In particular their eyes turned to the country which had embraced the comic like no other, Japan.

    In Japan what we call comics are referred to as Manga, which translates as "irreverent images." Manga exist in profusion, ranging in tone and theme for every age and interest. But the single work which most greatly influenced the new generation of American comic artists was the epic masterpiece of historical fiction Lone Wolf and Cub, written by Kazuo Koike and illustrated by Goseki Kojima.

    Set during the Tokugawa Shogunate in late medieval Japan, the story follows Itto Ogami and his infant son Daigoro. Ogami, the treacherously deposed official executioner of the Shogun, embraces the assassin's road, determined to walk the path of meifumado, accompanied by Daigoro, to avenge both his clan and his murdered wife.

    More than 9,000 pages long Lone Wolf and Cub is a magnificent and enthralling work of art, its themes ranging from fascinating explorations of buddhist and samurai philosphies to deeply varied examinations of the many historical elements of Samurai era Japan. Koike's powerful text works sublimely with Kojima's peerless visual storytelling.

    A little less than one half of Lone Wolf and Cub was published in the late 1980's by First Publishing. First Publishing went bankrupt and those following the story were left deprived of one of their central reasons for living. Last week, however, Dark Horse Publishing released the first two of its new editions of Lone Wolf, bound in book form.