Merry Month of Manga: TOMCATS

One of the advantages of a month of one-shots is that it gives me a chance to do some deep diving in my piles of BL books, since most of those are stand-alone volumes.

One of the disadvantages is that means I end up encountering oddities like this.

TOMCATS (Tenshi no Jikan), by Mashiro Minamino.  First published in 2005 and first published in North America in 2008.

PLOT:

Mao was just another disaffected young man slaving his days away in a pizza parlor.  Then he meets Tora, a strong, silent man who becomes just as fond of Mao as he is of his cats (who just so happen to be little people with cat ears and tails who are capable of speech, understanding, and cooking).  Tora's yakuza past eventually catches up to him, forcing Tora to flee with Mao and their cats to the desert.  While Mao and Tora adjust to their new life, their pets discover magic birds, never-ending food supplies, and a cat god.

STORY:

You know, it's not everyday that I review a manga like Tomcats.  It's the sort of manga that leaves you questioning why someone would publish it (much less license it in English).  It's not romantic, it's not cute, it's not funny, it's just this thing that gets increasingly bizarre with each turn of the page.

For something ostensibly marketed at BL, it doesn't have much time for its main couple.  It's only halfway through that we learn about Mao and Tora's backstories, and even then it's done entirely through flashback.  Minamino approaches their relationship in a shockingly unromantic manner.  They don't so much fall in love as they simply move in together without even a single utterance of "I love you."  The rest of the book is devoted to wacky cat-people adventures, which are all vaguely magical and extremely episodic.  It basically becomes a less femme version of Magical Nyan Nyan Taruto, something that no work should aspire to.  It's not even riffing on any of the usual cat jokes, save for their reassertions that they own their humans instead of the other way around.  Mostly it's a lot of aimless wandering, and it is painfully tedious.

ART:

Minamino's art is equally aimless and half-baked.  Their character designs are off-putting with their flat, noseless faces, stocky bodies, and clumsy, crude hands.  The cat-people don't look much better, especially since Minamoto is really inconsistent when it comes to their scale compared to humans.  Reaction shots are big and awkwardly drawn, and anytime they try to change the angle of their panels the art quality sinks.  I suspect the reason they set most of this story in a desert was so they didn't have to grapple with backgrounds.  Most of the time everyone seems to be drifting through the void.  

RATING:

I refuse to believe anyone looked at Tomcats and thought this was a good prospect.  This had to be a package deal.  Why else would any sensible manga publisher release something so strange, poorly drawn, and utterly pointless as this?

This book was published by Aurora Publishing.  It is currently out of print.