Hiroaki Samura's Emerald and Other Stories

This is a collection of seven standalone stories Samura drew between his longer works, gathered by Dark Horse into one English volume. The title piece is his first crack at a Western: a one-armed gunman and a sharp femme fatale pull a nasty job in a town full of secrets. The rest swings wildly in tone, from quiet character sketches to broad comedy to a few genuinely strange experiments. It is not a unified book and does not pretend to be. The pleasure is watching one of manga's great artists loosen up and try things he could not fit into a serialized epic.