Afro Samurai has been a self-published magazine, a toy, a video and a concept before it became a miniseries. All images Spike TV © 2006 Takashi Okazaki, Gonzo/Samurai Project. Licensed by FUNimation®.

The mountains of manga -- that's Japanese comics to you, gaijin -- produced every year have inspired no small number of anime TV series and full-length features, few of which make it to American shores. Usually it's the high profile, top-selling properties that get the multi-media treatment, not self-published fan efforts.

But not always.

Graphic designer Takashi (or as he calls himself, "Bob") Okazaki was still a student at Tama Art University when the image of a large-haired, black-skinned and vengeance-driven samurai warrior -- Afro Samurai -- first came to him. In today's Internet-fueled, mixmaster world culture, influences run every which way: from east to west (bringing anime and manga to the U.S.) and vice-versa, turning college kids like Okazaki onto hip hop music, Soul Train reruns and blaxploitation flicks.

Fame and fortune did not follow, at least not right away. Okazaki created a six-page Afro Samurai adventure and self-published it in a limited print-run magazine funded by himself and friends -- an effort that was greeted with instant indifference.

Graphic designer Takashi Okazaki won a contest to produce a toy figure of Afro Samurai, which caught the eye of GDH's Eric Calderon. It has taken five years to develop the concept for U.S. TV.

Afro's next go-round proved more fortunate, when Okazaki won a contest to produce a toy figure of his character. Only a few thousand were created, one of which wound up on the desk of a producer at Japan's Studio Gonzo animation house. The glowering samurai caught the eye of Eric Calderon, vp of creative affairs for Gonzo's parent company GDH International. Calderon, who spent a good part of the 1990s at MTV Animation, had been hired in 2001 by GDH to help the anime studio's shows penetrate the U.S. market. With sales to Adult Swim (Trinity Blood), IFC (Samurai 7) and G4 (Last Exile) Calderon was doing his job well, but Gonzo also wanted to do "fusion" animation -- co-productions with western companies.

Calderon "asked the producer about the toy. He told me the character was really cool, but the guy who made it was too shy to meet people. I pushed and pushed and eventually he met with me."

After meeting Okazaki, Calderon quickly decided to develop Afro Samurai for U.S. television, and not a Japanese show that would be post-dubbed into English. It was the beginning of what Calderon describes as "a long haul" -- one lasting half a decade, leading up to this week when Afro Samurai premieres on Spike TV as a five-episode mini-series.

Calderon convinced GDH to make a three-minute presentation video based on little more than the basic concept of the character, then gave home-burned DVD copies of it to friends in the L.A entertainment community. "Sam, you have to see this," said one of the recipients, an agent at the powerhouse ICM talent agency. The Sam in question was Samuel L. Jackson, who happened to be passing by his office. Even though the agent didn't rep Jackson, he suspected the video might pique the feisty star's interest.

That it did. According to Calderon, Jackson, "stole the DVD from the agent by force and started calling around town. He said, 'I am going to be Afro Samurai.' We said, 'Okay'."

One does not risk saying no to Samuel L. Jackson, especially when his name alone can -- at the very least -- guarantee doors will open to hear a pitch for an otherwise unknown property. Jackson was on board as Afro's voice and as an executive producer; Afro Samurai now had an enormous leg up on the competition.

"For the next eight months we were wined and dined," Calderon recalls. "Everyone thought Afro Samurai was going to be a movie, a videogame, a comicbook or a toy line. We started pitching the project before we knew what final form it would take," he confesses. "We weren't sure what to do with it -- there were tons of formats thrown around."

One of the parties pitched by Calderon was Leo Chu, the exec in charge of animation for Spike, the testosterone-fueled cable channel. Chu had come out of Disney where he was the exec producer on the American release of Miyazaki's Spirited Away and was no stranger to anime himself.

"I was very impressed," Chu acknowledges, "but there was no story per se when we started -- just a lot of potential. You discover a lot about animation as you flesh out a story, board it and create character designs. We just got behind it and went into story meetings."

The chemistry between Gonzo and Spike was perfect. The successor to the short-lived National Network (which itself had replaced the Nashville Network), Spike was in the process of redefining its original vague identity into a men's action channel -- and even though Afro Samurai was still in its formative stages, everyone recognized a good fit when they saw one. Chu and Calderon both credit Doug Herzog, president of MTV Networks for giving Spike the greenlight to develop the project without watering it down.

An old joke describes a camel as a horse designed by a committee; in hindsight it's either a miracle or brilliant intuition on everyone's part that Afro Samurai emerged from development as a sleek predator and not a three-humped dromedary.