Manga Review: Black Cat - Page 2

The Rudman contract leads our team into first contact with Creed Diskenth, a former Chronos assassin like Train, and the man responsible for the death of the Black Cat's "dearest friend," a lady sweeper named Saya. Creed is an androgynously pretty figure with a major thing for Train; plotting to double-cross and overthrow Chronos, he attempts to enlist the sweeper, but our footloose hero wants none of it. With the appearance of Creed and his underlings, the sci-fantasy elements get upped even further: each one, we learn, has the ability to manifest their chi in powerful ways. One henchman, for instance, is capable of creating bee puppets that can sap your will when they sting and put you under their creator's control. Much of this talk of chi sounds very similar to the mystical gobbledegook that fuels Naruto's fight sequences – not much different than the catch-all of "mutation" used to buttress Marvel's X-books, actually – though when you get down to it, all the whys-and-wherefores are less important than the sight of a swarm of mechanical bees honing in our hero.

Yabuki's art (as with other manga digests, we get to briefly meet his three art assistants in a set of one-page strips appended at the end of each volume) is clean and cartoony in places (as with other manga series, he thinks nothing of rendering bumps on the head that are almost as big as the character's head itself), crisp during the action sequences when it needs to be (I found the fight sequences much easier to follow than, say, some of the dust-ups in Naruto) and serious when it needs to be. Though the series' tone is predominately devil-may-care, it occasionally strikes a tone of melancholy, most typically when Heartnet recalls his doomed dearest friend Saya.

If Yabuki's protagonists look too fresh-faced to carry the weight of the world, it's a small quibble; his crew is deft at rendering appropriately debauched or careworn secondary characters. There's a Creed henchman who steps forward in Volume Three, for instance, who looks like he could be a young goth updating of Will Eisner's Mr. Carrion. His chi power: to take the dripping blood from his body and transform it into a gloppy weapon that he aims at his enemies. Now that's an out-there super-ability.

Article Author: Bill Sherman

Bill Sherman is the Comics & Graphic Novels review editor for Blogcritics. With his lovely wife Rebecca Fox, he has recently co-authored a sudsy size acceptance novel entitled Measure By Measure.

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