Volume 5 Page 137
Posted March 28, 2019 at 12:01 am

Panel 2: For the record, thats not a blade stuffed down the still-unnamed kunoichi’s cleavage, but rather a sheathed bo*—that is, stick-shaped—shuriken. Pointy tip, but no sharp edges. Still not something that most folks would care to store in such an area, but then again, most folks aren’t quasi-mystical superhuman shinobi, are they? (If this tragic lack of realism distresses you sorely, I’d have to suggest that you might have read over 900 pages of the wrong superhero comic.) For the record, this goofy “cleavage sheath” dealie is mainly a visual joke on my part. After seeing hundreds if not seemingly thousands of busty lady shinobi in manga and anime, I began to wonder why none ever carried one of their bajillion hidden weapons tucked away down their bounteous décolletage.

On the bo shuriken front, Naruto has hopelessly confused matters by its popularization of the similar-looking kunai ninja tool as a thrown weapon, even though the (ahem) “real” kunai was a big, blunt instrument used mainly for prying and digging. Yes, it supposedly could be flung at an enemy in an emergency, but so could a shovel or a brick or a shoe; that doesn’t make any of those items a particularly ideal throwing weapon.

Panels 3-4 set up a few plot threads that proved trickier to pay off than I anticipated a decade ago. Some of this gear (“the f**king compounds” in particular) becomes relevant to events in the Ninjette-centric Empowered vol. 7, but the “blood” reference hasn’t yet paid off, as it’s part of a catastrophic plot resolution I haven’t yet been able to get to.

-Adam Warren

*Technically bou, I suppose, to indicate the extended "o" sound in Japanese. Looks like this commentary's font doesn't support the preferred "o with a macron over it" to indicate vowel extension, much to my annoyance.

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