Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman continues to influence your favorite characters in pop culture, whether or not you’re aware of it. Take Ahsoka in Star Wars, for instance: season 1 of the show featured a lightsaber exercise called Zatochi, where a Padawan wears a helmet that blocks their sense of sight. Of course, Ahsoka herself also holds her lightsabers in a reverse grip, like the Blind Swordsman himself. But Zatoichi’s influence isn’t limited to just Star Wars. Now, he’s provided the basis for Cyclops’s current series from Alex Paknadel and Rogê Antônio.
Right now, Cyclops is stranded in the wilderness without his visor. Scott has to keep his eyes closed as he tries to survive in the backcountry, because he’s a leader of the X-Men, not a menace to the environment. On the Voice of the Heroes podcast, Paknadel said, “We’ve taken his visor away, so he finds himself in the wilderness, but his visor’s gone. So you have this whole kind of like, quasi sort of intentional Zatoichi situation going on, where he’s trying to navigate his way around. He can’t see because if he opens his eyes, anything he sees is, like, gone, right? So he has control over nothing.”
But why put Scott Summers on this journey? Later on, Paknadel said, “If you look at the way that Scott behaves in situations that he can’t control, this idea that he’s this Boy Scout, I don’t buy it at all… This is a guy who can’t, like, have a nightmare, you know what I mean? This is a guy who can’t sleepwalk. This is a guy who cannot lose control ever… The visor is kind of like a control rod in a nuclear reactor. You take away that visor, and there’s going to be an explosion.”
It’s worth noting that in the Zatoichi film series from the 1960s, Zatoichi is a formidable swordsman whose power lies partly in his ability to control his emotions. Zatoichi is a low-ranking member of society because he’s blind, and he frequently comes to the defense of women, children, and other people who can’t defend themselves. Injustice is something that Zatoichi comes across all the time, but because he’s just one man, he can’t allow himself to get baited into a fight where he can’t perform his best. In other words, Zatoichi is governed by a sense of control in a way that parallels Cyclops.
Cyclops #1 is available from Marvel Comics February 11.
AloJapan.com