Kazuo Umezu’s CAT EYED BOY ranks as among the most fun I’ve ever had reading horror comics. This is high praise, especially when you consider it’s manga — a format that generally agrees with me about as much as a Payday bar would to someone allergic to peanuts.
The title character fits his name: He’s a boy and he has eyes like a cat. Truth in advertising! He also has ears like a bat, and quite a gift for grotesque storytelling. Apparently there are 11 tales of terror split up between VOLUME ONE and VOLUME TWO, but my review copy amounted to half of the former, containing three stories.
In them, Cat Eyed Boy can be merely a host or an active participant. In the first, “The Immortal Man,” he’s secretly living in the attic of a mansion, and lets us in on the goings-on he sees through a peephole in the floor and from the rooftops he crouches behind. A horribly hideous-faced man is stalking the little boy who lives there with his father. There’s a lot of blood, disembodied limbs and a wormish creature that looks not unlike a toothed phallus.
Based upon its title, “The Ugly Demon” may sound like it was written by a second-grader, but its subject matter is unmistakably adult. A woman is shunned by her village after she gives birth to a incredibly deformed child, who takes out his frustration by killing animals — bugs, frogs and cats; from the latter, he pulls out claws with pliers. He harbors a crush on a cute girl that of course goes unreturned, so he grows up with a grudge he’ll eventually get to exercise.
Finally, there’s “The Tsunami Summoners.” A wife and mother slips away at night when she hears strange moans outdoors, and disappears. Her understandably curious goes searching for her, only to find unspeakable horrors instead. And the babies — oh, the babies! It creeps me out just to think about it.
Umezu’s art is of the Japanese old-school variety — you know, kind of what SPEED RACER used to look like, and none of this modern-day cutey-pie crap where people’s eyes look as if they were dilated beyond the FDA-approved guidelines. He draws to freak out, and succeeds. Some of his monsters reminded me of the kind of crazy creations Basil Wolverton used to crank out in the 1960s, but with much more goo and palpable menace.
There’s a bit of kitsch at play in CAT EYED BOY — with that moniker, how could there not be? But it helps make for a most satisfying Far East twist on the TALES FROM THE CRYPT formula. Even xenophobic horror fans will be converted. —Rod Lott
