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WHAT'S MICHAEL? VOLUME 9: THE IDEAL CAT TPB
Highly Recommended (10/10)
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Dark Horse Comics
Writer/Artist: Makoto Kobayashi
Translation: Dana Lewis & Lea Hernandez
Lettering/Retouch: Digital Chameleon
Editors: Tim Ervin-Gore & Chris Warner
Price: $8.95 US |
I am not what you would call a cat lover. I'm a dog person who is allergic to cats, and who never much liked them anyway. I can't pet them without sneezing, and I wouldn't if I could. The same personality traits that draw people to cats are what put me off the little buggers in the first place. I just don't like them. So can someone please explain to me why What's Michael?, a regular love poem to cats and cat owners in comic-book form, has become one of my favorite manga? OK, that's a rhetorical question, I actually know the answer: It's because the book is fall-down funny. It took me a couple of volumes to realize what Kobayashi was doing, telling stories where there is no status quo, where Michael is just as likely to be a housecat as he is a salaryman working at an office, but once I got that simple conceit, I fell in love with Kobayashi's weird and hilarious short tales of cats, their owners and the dogs who live in their world. What's Michael? proves what I think we all suspected: When it comes to cat humor, Garfield is a pussy.
I first came to appreciate Kobayashi's work because of his work on Club 9, another funny feature from Super Manga Blast! that focuses on club girls. From there, I transitioned into looking into What's Michael?, which has a similar sense of humor but is somehow completely different. While Club 9 has its surreal aspects, they come mostly from the Japanese culture shock, not from the writing itself. What's Michael?, on the other hand, often veers into the just plain bizarre. And by often, I mean just about every feature in this volume is strange in some way. From alley cat fights turning into measured martial arts bouts to the tale of a dog anthropomorphized into a period samurai tale to the near-indescribable story of owner laziness that opens the volume, Kobayashi's stories pick up on the idiosyncrasies of pets in general and cats in specific and throw in manga weirdness to create a perfect blend.
A big part of what makes What's Michael? work is that Kobayashi is a wizard with expressions. His people are exaggerated, and their expressions equally so, and Kobayashi really knows how to have his characters mug for the camera for comedic effect. The increasing frustration of the photographer who is trying to capture an alley cat on film plays out as much on the face of the character as it does in the narration, and the borderline manic happiness of Michael's owners as they watch his shenanigans speaks volumes about these relatively small (but important) characters. Then there's Kobayashi's way with cats, which make it quite clear that he's a cat owner and lover himself. There's one sequence here that plays off a vampire discovering a cat in his would-be victim's bed, and the innocent, mildly playful expression on the cat's face is a perfect counterpoint to his role in the story. Kobayashi also does really fun stuff with anthropomorphic animals... rather than turning them into humanoids, it's as if he's just dressed these cats and dogs (and chinchillas, and whatever else) in people's clothing and stood them on their hind legs. It's difficult to properly describe, but it's always funny to look at.
There's a sweetness to What's Michael? that is also pretty irresistable, and I think that it is this quality as much as the humor that makes this reader a fan. Cats are often thought of as independent animals that can often embody the worst qualities of humans, like jealousy and selfishness, but Kobayashi hits on the more cute fuzzy animal aspects of the animals as well. "The Ideal Cat," a funny look at, well, the ideal cat, is really sweet as well as being funny, and there's something just undeniably cute about three cats trying to act tough in "The Three Amigatos." Even when Kobayashi is showing the destruction that cats are capable of in "Art Gallery," it's played off as something kind of cute and endearing, rather than just annoying.
Bottom line, What's Michael? isn't likely to get me to go out and pick up a cat from the animal shelter. For one thing, my poor dog is terrorized enough just having a little girl in the house. But reading a few volumes of What's Michael? has been enough to put this book on my must-read list, and it is one of the funniest comics to be found on the shelves. Oh, and don't worry about the "volume 9," this is a book that is completely standalone. I'd be happy if Dark Horse would put some of the early volumes back in print, but this is a book that you can jump on with any given issue and get the whole deal, regardless of which volume it is.
This comic book was not among this week's new releases.
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