Took a bunch of comics, books, and Blu-Rays I knew I'd never read/watch again to this store that does trade-ins and came out with enough store credit to buy the coolest thing in the store: the first volume 'Gallery Edition' (what Dark Horse calls their version of the 'Artist Edition' format that IDW has made famous) of Usagi Yojimbo! It contains several stories stretching from Usagi's early mid-'80s appearances through the mid-'90s: The short stories that introduced characters like Gen, Jotaro and Kitsune as well as the original 'origin' tale the made up the first four issues of the comic reprinted in full.
These books, for those who don't know, reproduce the original comic art with fidelity as close as possible to the real thing: high quality color photos of the art showing the texture and color of the paper, the pencil lines and painted-out corrections that are purposely lost when the art reproduced in a published comic, and the art is reproduced in the original size that the artist worked in. Most comic art is shrunk down for publication, but each each artist feels comfortable drawing in different sizes, so the size of these books vary wildly. This one's big, but some are
enormous. This one is as 'small' as I've seen one of these books.
Here's Stan Sakai himself with a copy for scale:
