Collection Samurai Jack

Samurai Jack is the most visually confident thing Cartoon Network has ever produced. Genndy Tartakovsky built it around silence - episodes with almost no dialogue, long static shots, and fight scenes that resolve in a single frame of a sword being sheathed.

The premise is simple: a samurai is thrown into a future ruled by the demon who destroyed his kingdom, and he is looking for a way back. That structure allowed the series to be an anthology, going from comedy to horror to wordless meditation week by week.

The art direction has no outlines on backgrounds, which was a deliberate homage to UPA-era animation and gives every frame the look of a painted screen. Nothing else on television looked like it.

Aku is one of the great cartoon villains, and much of that is Mako Iwamatsu's voice performance - theatrical, petulant and genuinely menacing in the same sentence.

This collection covers Jack, his katana and Aku.