Cat Eyed Boy, Vol. 2

Cat Eyed Boy #2

by Kazuo Umezu

Cat-Eyed Boy is a half-human, half-monster child who mostly resembles a human, and therefore cannot live in the demon world. He lives hidden in the shadows of the human world, hated by both demons and humans. But wherever he goes, awful events occur. Humans interact with demons, but for the most part it is the humans that appear to act more evil than the monsters. Cat-Eyed Boy acts like Trickster, saving the innocent and helping the wicked receive the punishment that fate metes out.  The stories are mostly tales of revenge and retribution for the evil acts people do. The series is broken into 11 individual stories, full of extremely grotesque and disturbing images.

Genres: Manga, Horror, Comics, Graphic Novels, Short Stories, Comix, Fiction

487 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Kazuo Umezu or Kazuo Umezz was a Japanese manga artist, musician and actor. Starting his career in the 1950s, he is among the most famous artists of horror manga and has been vital for its development, considered the "god of horror manga". In 1960s shōjo manga like Reptilia, he broke the industry's conventions by combining the aesthetics of the commercial manga industry with gruesome visual imagery inspired by Japanese folktales, which created a boom of horror manga and influenced manga artists of following generations. He created successful manga series such as The Drifting Classroom, Makoto-chan and My Name Is Shingo, until he retired from drawing manga in the mid 1990s. He was a public figure in Japan, known for wearing red-and-white-striped shirts and doing his signature "Gwash" hand gesture.

Reviews

[Ignacio · Rating 2 out of 5]

Terminada "La agrupación Cien Yokai", el resto del tomo se vuelve cansino. Mola cuando Umezz libera su faceta cafre y somete a los personajes humanos a todo tipo de sufrimientos mientras El chico de los ojos de gato intenta salvarlos o se queda de miranda. Además "El yokai Nikudama" es una inteligente traslación de las secuelas de los bombardeos de Hiroshima y Nagasaki, sin llegar a mencionarlos. Sin embargo, entre esa pertinencia y los ocasionales excesos las historietas se alargan y se alargan. Tampoco ayudan las últimas 120 páginas, una recopilación de aventuras de un dominical que, en su mayoría, sacrifican el punto macabro además de atascarse en una narrativa basada en paneles de 3x4 viñetas que limitan la espontaneidad y ese punto efectista de Umezz. Si a esto le sumas que la reproducción de las manchas de tinta y el color se comen el dibujo en varias partes, y la carencia de cualquier tipo de artículo que contextualice lo leído, este tomo me ha dejado una sensación amarga.

[Lectubea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Segunda y última entrega de estos dos maxi tomos de El chico de los ojos de gato. Si el primero me pareció turbio, este aún más.

Aquí seguimos las aventuras de el chico con los ojos de gato, que ya sabemos que se mete en cualquier casa y se conforma con dormir en el desván. Pero allá a donde va, lleva la desgracia, y en esta ocasión no será menos. Desde Yokais, hasta una diosa asesina de muchos brazos, se verá metido en algún que otro percance con tal de ayudar a las pobres personas que sufren desgracias y maldiciones.

Me ha parecido bastante sangriento, y no tiene nada que envidiar a otros grandes del manga de terror. De hecho, según leí Junji Ito se inspiró en este mangaka, y no me extraña que la obra de Ito me recuerde a la de Umezz.

Yo os lo recomiendo si os gusta el terror, el horror y no sois nada aprehensivos.

[Coke Fernández · Rating 4 out of 5]

8/10

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Never thought I'd say this, but the meatball monster story went on way too long

[P. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cat-eyed boy always gets blamed for the monstrous things he saves humans from, but he doesn't really care as long as he can live in their attics and steal their food. I love that he's not always moping about his place in life, and that he has enough vim to piss on things that he thinks are stupid (can we have an indie car decal with Cat-eyed boy pissing on things to rival the inexplicable Calvin ones found on many trucks around the country? jk.)

Creepy and funny. I can't explain the appeal of watching a family run around and yell "Meatball! I see meatball!" for hundreds of pages, but it is appealing. And, even better, Meatball monster is actually scary. I wish that the library's copy o ffirst volume of this hadn't been lost, but I do think I'd enjoy owning copies of the stories.

[Orrin Grey · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Cat Eyed Boy stories are definitely more fun than they are good, exactly. Definitely not on the same level as, say, The Drifting Classroom, these stories are still kind of a blast, in an old-fashioned horror comic kind of way. And they're full of pretty great monsters, though this volume wasn't quite as good for it as the first volume was.

It's still really lame that they split one of the stories in half. I'm pretty sure they could've easily file the whole story into one volume, and then put the other stories in a separate one.

Once again, the layout and design here is completely spectacular, although this one is full of pages that appear to have been colorized seemingly at random. There's probably an explanation for it, but I don't know what it is.

[Hamletmaschine · Rating 5 out of 5]

En mi opinión, mucho mejor que el primero. Grotesco y surrealista, pero no sin cierta ingenuidad infantil, cierta animalidad muy fina.

Este trabajo de los sesenta deja entrever, más que los demás que le he conocido, su influencia en otros autores, como Junji Ito, Hiseshi Hino y Minetaro Mochizuki.

Uno de los más imprescindibles maestros del género.

[Pedro Plasencia Martínez · Rating 4 out of 5]

En este segundo tomo de 'El chico de los ojos de gato' ya podemos hablar con propiedad de terror y de madurez artística. Estas historias sí que contienen material para dar pesadillas, sobre todo teniendo en cuenta que no se trata de una obra dirigida a los adultos, sino al público shonen. Umezo deja más de lado las situaciones raras, lo que vendría a ser la ficción extraña con sus fantasías y su surrealismo, para abrazar completamente el horror, la violencia y el drama. Me han gustado especialmente los capítulos cortos autoconclusivos del final del manga por su componente psicológico, que destaca al crear una aprensión similar a la que originó en su día el mismísimo Edgar Allan Poe. Da la impresión de que el manga finalizó en su punto más alto.

ENGLISH
In this second volume we can now speak properly of terror and artistic maturity. These stories do contain material to give you nightmares, especially considering that this is not a work aimed at adults, but at shonen audiences. Umezo leaves aside strange situations, what would be weird fiction with its fantasies and surrealism, to fully embrace horror, violence and drama. I especially liked the short, self-contained chapters at the end of the manga for their psychological component, which stands out by creating an apprehension similar to that created by Edgar Allan Poe himself. It feels like the manga ended at its highest point.

[Thurston Hunger · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wraps up the excellent "Band of One Hundred Monsters" - some kind of morbid musing crossing lepidoptery and those jars of pickeled organs. "Meatball" my kids liked, but it felt sort of stuck in a rut, but it is an exercise in the visceral horror, a phantasmagorical take on what can consume our minds and our bodies.

Add in a couple more short stories on the inescapable nature of death, and then ending with child's play and imagination gone astray.

[Jack · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one definitely feels more slapdash in construction than the first volume, but it’s a fun time regardless. The “make it up as you go along” spirit to the stories actually ends up reinforcing the nightmarish dream-logic quality more often than not. Also, the monsters are neat and there’s a lot of conceptually messed up stuff in this so it’s a winner in my book.

[Quentin Wallace · Rating 3 out of 5]

I couldn't quite get into this series. This was just too weird, and not like Junji Ito is weird. This was more silly weird. There was some very disturbing horror in here, but sometimes it was just too over the top. Plus, it was odd how the Cat Eyed Boy was always peeing on things. (I guess that's the cat in him.)

Overall not bad, just a little too weird.

[Sopademiso · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mejor construido que el primero. Las historias de la versión shonen sunday me han resultado más originales y amenas que las anteriores algo más largas. Es un manga curioso y original aunque no es el mejor comic de terror que he leído ni mucho menos. Es más bien gracioso y entrañable

[Ringa · Rating 4 out of 5]

saatanpa tutustua umezuun vähän paremmin!

[Cristina Bracho Carrillo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Todas las noches llevaré ofrendas de sangre a la Kannon de los mil brazos para que publiquen más traducciones al español de la obra del maestro Umezz.

[Jameson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A mutant with claws and a healing factor protects humans that hate and fear him, but his name’s not Wolverine, and he likes to piss on stuff.

[Luke Michaels · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked the moral ambiguity of the cat eyed boy character. I liked these, more than the drifting classroom, but not as much as the Junji Ito books that ran after these walked.

[Mikey The Librarian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh gods!!!! M E A T B A L L.!.! What a nightmarish creation. 😂🤣😂. Such a fun series

[George (Abandoned Places) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cat-Eyed Boy is a goblin child, hated by humans and demons alike. He has a knack for mischief and is pals with every cat on earth. Cat-Eyed Boy is a master of illusion and can alter his appearance at will. Oh, and he likes pissing on things. Trouble follows the Cat-Eyed Boy wherever he goes. If he hides in your attic, chances are that you will soon be besieged by wicked, cackling monsters.

This is the second of a two-volume set: almost 1,000 pages of Cat-Eyed Boy. There are some great stories here. We have The Meatball Monster, so named because it looks like a meatball with arms and legs. The story goes on for almost 200 pages, with the characters saying things like: “Soon you will see Meatball” and “UWAGH! It’s Meatball!”

There are other monsters. You won’t hear about the Thousand-Handed Goddess in Sunday School because she’s old school, skittering along on her thousand hands and slurping up blood like chocolate milk. And then there’s The Snake Man story, which reads like an evil fairy tale.

The stories are not for the faint-hearted. The monsters are vividly drawn and quite grotesque. Children get smacked around by their parents; good people die alongside the bad (the longstanding cliché in horror comics of bad people meeting bad ends and good people being ok doesn’t hold true here); and the Cat-Eyed boy is beaten, stabbed, strangled, shot, tied up and pummeled. He just laughs.

A must-read for horror fans!

[Jon Holt · Rating 4 out of 5]

V2 is better than V1. More stories that are short but to the point, building up the appropriate level of suspense and delivering with a great twist or shock. Some stories even have a poetic ending to them where Umezu gracefully ends a story leaving more to the imagination of the reader unlike his longer stories in V1 that end poorly because, the reader senses, Umezu painted himself into a corner or just got tired from the work. "The Hand" and the 11-armed Kannon story particularly stand out.

[Mark Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love this book. Umezu is one of the all time greats.