Cat-Eyed Boy Review

You can think of Cat-Eyed Boy as a kind of action-packed version of Umezz’s Orochi. Like Orochi, this character lives on the edges of human society. However, Cat-Eyed Boy is more interested in monsters than people. He’s inspired by a character named Kitaro from Shigeru Mizuki, a series that came out seven years before Cat-Eyed Boy. Sometimes, the book feels like it’s mixing Kitaro with scary comics from the US called EC Comics. It works pretty well because Umezz is good at what he does, but it doesn’t have the same strong impact and sad feeling as Orochi.

The scariest monsters often seem very human at first. By the time you get to the fifth story, “The Band of One Hundred Monsters,” the monsters are mean because of how other people treated them. Cat-Eyed Boy knows he’s different from everyone else, and he’s kind of like characters in Edogawa Ranpo’s stories (they mention him too). He’s sort of an outsider.

If you’re a fan of Junji Ito, you should check this out because you can see how the style progressed from Mizuki to Umezz and then to Ito. Thanks to Viz Media for sending in a review copy.