Space Usagi takes Stan Sakai’s rabbit samurai into a different kind of adventure. This Usagi Yojimbo spin-off trades historical Japan for a science-fiction future while keeping the sense of duty, conflict, and adventure that defines Sakai’s work.
Sakai’s starting point was wonderfully simple: he liked drawing dinosaurs. Putting them into Usagi’s seventeenth-century setting would be awkward, so he considered either traveling back to prehistoric times or visiting another planet where dinosaurs still existed. He chose outer space.
The idea developed during the success of Usagi’s TMNT action figure, whose sales were reported in the millions. Playmates was interested in more characters, and Space Usagi offered another possibility. With Bucky O’Hare also moving into animation and games, a spacefaring rabbit looked like a concept that could travel beyond comics.
Space Usagi appeared in Usagi Yojimbo Color Special #3 in 1992 and in Mirage’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #47. The latter story uses time travel to bring the historical and futuristic Usagis together, even setting them against each other. Sakai also developed the character’s own three-issue adventure.
Rather than abandoning the familiar cast completely, Sakai brought recognizable counterparts into the future, presenting them as descendants of characters from Usagi’s historical world.
The political conflicts retain echoes of the older setting, even with spaceships and futuristic weapons. The influence of space opera, including Star Wars, is easy to recognize in the new surroundings.
Mirage published the early Space Usagi miniseries. The broader science-fiction setting gave Sakai creative freedom beyond the limits of a story set in historical Japan, including room for new creatures, enemies, and technology. The collected adventures include “Death and Honor,” “White Star Rising,” and “Warrior.”
An animated Space Usagi project also reached the pilot stage, with a short presentation made to attract investment. It did not become a broadcast series. The commercial climate around space-adventure cartoons and their associated toy lines, including Bucky O’Hare, forms part of the project’s development story; a finished pilot was not the same thing as a funded production.
There were also plans for Space Usagi to appear in the Fast Forward era of the 2003 TMNT cartoon. A story was written, but that proposed adventure was never produced or aired.
Dark Horse published Space Usagi material in the 1990s, including the 1996 period. Much later, Netflix’s Samurai Rabbit: The Usagi Chronicles arrived in 2022. Its futuristic rabbit hero offers an interesting parallel, although the series follows Yuichi Usagi and is not a direct adaptation of Space Usagi.
Space Usagi’s thirtieth anniversary in 2022 brought a color edition of the first issue, including limited variants advertised in runs of 500. It was another chance to revisit a character whose adventures began with Sakai simply wanting to draw some dinosaurs.