Benkei in New York- A Hard Boiled Killer with an Artistic Streak
Skilled with a brush and a blade, Benkei in New York released in 1991 and created by writer Jinpachi Mori and mangaka Jiroh Taniguchi, follows our anti-hero Benkei as he drifts through the city’s seedy alleyways and bars with a mission: exacting cold hard revenge.
Living as an artist painting forgeries for the mob by day but a hitman after dark, Benkei gives everything his signature attention to detail and dry sense of humour. Benkei in New York, although only one volume, blends perfectly the feeling of an old school detective novel and the aesthetics of a quality manga, brimming with atmospherically bleak illustrations.
Told as a series of short vignettes, our lead character Benkei is tasked with a different hit each chapter. These dirty jobs take him to iconic NYC locales like Central Park to the Natural History Musuem. Throughout his journeys he never fails to deliver a merciless kill or an impeccable copy of an artistic masterpiece for his clients scattered throughout NYC’s underworld. All he leaves behind is a trail of blood and a bit of cynicism that could be mistaken as poetic.
Benkei in New York is a love letter to American film noir movies, which had a golden age from 1940-1960. Much like the manga, the film noir genre shows the world as a dog-eat-dog place, with treachery, death, and dirty deals from all angles.
The manga packs all this in and more, featuring the same hardboiled archetypes like femme fatales ready to lead their lovers to doom plus, men clad in a trenchcoats ready to solve any obstacle with their fists mixed with a wise crack. Benkei's art direction takes inspiration from cinema’s use of shadow, pacing, extreme angular panels and a steady dose of violence giving you a reading experience that runs almost like your favorite gritty movie.
Benkei stands out from your standard hitman centric-manga, because of it's hybrid East meets West feeling found in it's dialogue and art, and a total lack of effort to make Benkei a redeemable guy- which is exactly why he's so charming. Take a look through the slides to get your dark crime fix.
