3 out of 5

As we’ve seen in the post–Senso Usagis, Stan has been employing an expressive looseness in his art, along with some interestingly darker themes.  ‘The Bride’ is the first followup that feels a bit more like traditional Usagi in terms of story – inadvertent conflict, a telegraphed twist, and then a winking epilogue – but it’s also, frustratingly, also the first one where that looseness occasionally feels sloppy.  Our wandering rabbit comes across an abandoned palanquin in the midst of a body-strewn patch of forest – apparently two sides of a struggle that managed to uniformly off the other…  It’s an interesting mystery, solved somewhat immediately when the young woman still hiding in the palanquin mentions she’s the focus of a family marriage dispute.  Who exactly dispatch kidnappers her way is unknown, but we can pretty much put it together when a shadowy figure rubs his chin, strokes his mustache, and chortles (not quite, but essentially).  Since there’s no one else the shadowy figure can be except someone later important to the story…  The pieces are pretty big and obvious.  Sakai employs a big, blocky inking style here which adds a nice solidity to some sequences, but he flubs the latter half’s dramatic, constantly drawing the young woman with odd expressions, like he was tired of drawing her.  Again, this is in part an extension of Sakai’s (maybe) attempt at being even more free with his penciling, but it disrupted the flow of the book.

Otherwise an average, and generally predictable, UY entry.