As a post Halloween bonus, we’re going to honor the Latin world’s Dia de los Muertos with a look at some skull-masked shinobi. MONSTERS AND MASKS month has been sadly bereft of our beloved Sword Girls, too, so we’ll wrap things up with Saori – the ferocious flipping female sidekick from KaiketsuLion Maru.
Akiko Kujo starred as the muscular-legged kunoichi companion of the super-powered proto-furry superhero, and while he had a magic sword, a pegasus, nigh-invulnerability, the ability to make monsters explode, etc, Saori was content with a simple short sword and an even shorter skirt…
Here’s the happy and heroic cast……and these are the evil henchmen. Amazing how the addition of a simple skull mask over an off-the-rack ninja suit equals INSTANT AWESOME!Yeah, it’s a Japanese show, and some assume they’re all pervs and even a heroine in a kid’s show would be there for one reason and one reason only, but that’s just not true here. Take a look at action shots like this. They’re obviously NOT about the gratuitous panty flashes…No, they’re about one woman standing up to a man’s world. One rather under-clad woman… often standing slightly above the camera’s sightline…See, she’s a wildcat. She’s… what are all those cliches the comic book industry clings to… oh yeah – she’s EMPOWERED by her sexuality, a combatant unencumbered by flesh-concealing protective gear…
She wears her gender on her sleeve, she’s a GRRRL man, yeah, that’s it. That’s a warrior right there, not an underwear model exposed at every possible opportunity by lascivious camera operators and hand-gnashing directors…
In the end, she’s not a damsel in distress or a ditzy assistant, she’s the scourge of these skull-masked houligans!These lucky, lucky, lucky skull-masked houligans.
