Cat Eyed Boy

Cat Eyed Boy Volume One
Story and Art Kazuo Umezu
$24.99 USD/$29.99 CAN
544 pages
Released Jun. 17, 2008

Finally making my way through the first volume of Kazuo Umezu's wonderful Cat Eyed Boy after sitting on my shelf for well over a year. Man, this is really great stuff and although it cannot top the gonzo classic known as The Drifting Classroom it has the same oddness that makes Umezu's brand of horror so enjoyable. The best way to describe it for the uninitiated is if Tezuka had somehow found work at EC in the 1950's and like the best of the EC output, it's hard to imagine this was aimed at children, young children.

Originally released in serialized weekly form in the mid 1960's and Filled with creepy cool monsters and goblins, the 500 plus pages are made up of several short tales hosted a la Rod Serling by the Cat Eyed Boy, an exiled drifter who because of his appearance (and being a monster/goblin himself) is forced to steal food and squat in peoples homes. Because of his own supernatural origins (briefly shown in one tale) his very presence brings about bizarre circumstances to the poor folks whose attics he's shacking up in and what follows are morality stories with the usual twists and tales surely based on Japanese superstitions and folklore.

With an almost American underground style inspired by early manga artists like Tezuka that almost defies categorization, the art and story are uniquely Umezu and have this "I'm making it up as I go along and I really can't draw everything "charm. Definitely not essential reading, still loads of fun none the less. The book is a bit hampered by some bad reproduction work similar to the blurry reprints that often turn up in many of the Marvel Essential phonebooks, and like Buddah, the editors felt the need to contemporize some of the dialogue (maybe for younger readers?). I also would have loved an essay or some historical background on Umezu and this work in context of what was happening in the world of Japanese comics of the time, as even in this age of information overload, substantial writing on Umezu's work is kind of hard to find. Kudos to Viz's design team for some of the most handsome looking volumes the company has released and for not dividing the work into 10 smaller books.

I have to assume based on the friends that I tried in vain to loan this tome to that younger manga fans will likely be turned off by the antiquated art and simplistic stories. Fine with me, you keep reading your 60th volume of Naruto while I happily seek out Volume Two of Cat Eyed Boy. Recommended 4/5