A Man & His Cat

Umi Sakurai A Man & His Cat (2018)
Some facebook thread on a friend's page recently threw up the assertion that western comics are crap because it's all superheroes while manga is amazing because it can be about anything. This one is about a man and his cat, as the title implies. Unfortunately though, despite the sheer force with which the subject alone socks it to anyone who ever dared take pleasure in an issue of Superman Family, it's still manga.

I'm well aware that manga has its admirers.

I'm not one of them, because to admire something simply because of its format would be fucking stupid, like enjoying vinyl records regardless of what's recorded on them. I liked a few of the Godzilla comics which Dark Horse reprinted back in the late eighteenth century, and Akira and Grave of the Fireflies were great - although they're movies - but I remain otherwise unconvinced.

On the other hand, I'm a big fan of cats, which is why my wife and I have a number of them - not less than thirteen, usually more depending on who turns up for breakfast - and we also volunteer for a local cat rescue organisation; so you can sort of see how I ended up with this book, which is a manga.

The story is about an old man - or one who is referred to as an old man despite his depiction - who buys a cat, followed by the usual realisations which occur to anyone who takes on a cat regarding their feeding, use of litter tray, and so on and so forth. Of course, it's mainly about how much the man and his cat love each other.

It's a nice idea except the cat resembles a Pokémon character and seems to have been written by someone who doesn't understand cats - so Fukumaru, as the cat is named, is written with the needy qualities of a dog and eyes abrim with tears for almost half the page count. The purpose of the story seems to be delivery of the narrative equivalent of a series of emoticons, emotional currents reduced to a series of hearts and frowny faces. Consequently A Man & His Cat feels like one-hundred pages of button pushing.

Even with more of a story, I'm not convinced it would work. As you might expect, it's all giant eyes, tiny mouths and infantilised women, the same style as drawn by a billion others churning out this same corporate variant on cereal box design, all distinctive qualities flattened out to the artificial texture of mass production and candy. This saddens me because I respond to anything involving a cat, but this one doesn't feel entirely sincere. Fukumaru's dialogue substituting you for mew and my for meow just isn't that funny, and the whole thing has the unpleasant angular look of a style copied without much underlying ability to draw or to arrange shapes on a piece of paper; and the supposedly old man looks about thirty, or would if he didn't resemble Christian Bale in American Psycho, or would if he looked remotely human with that weird angular chin. Seriously, it all makes Rob Liefeld look like Leonardo da Vinci and I don't know how people can be satisfied with anything so thin, so lacking in character.