What's Michael?, Vol. 1 by Makoto Kobayashi

I found myself being reminded of my own pet cats by a lot of the chapters I read, and you can tell that Kobayashi spent a lot of time around cats while he was writing it. Most of the appeal comes from the cuteness with which Michael and the other cats are drawn, but the comics do have a lot of genuine humor and charm to them.

While there is some continuity between the stories featuring the same human cast, each chapter is entirely self-contained and you could open the book almost anywhere and read a story without being lost. Stories jump back and forth between these, so one chapter might show Michael as the pet of a Yakuza, while the next shows him with a young couple. Michael and the other cats featured in the comic are more archetypes than characters, and Michael is depicted living with various owners or being a stray cat as the story calls for it. Unlike the later Weekly Morning cute cat comic Chi’s Sweet Home, What’s Michael? isn’t a traditional serialized comic. All of Dark Horse’s other comics originally published in the ’90s, like Oh My Goddess!, have been restored to their original orientation in newer editions. There’s nothing wrong with this and it certainly makes things a little easier for non-manga readers, but it’s also very unusual for a book released in 2020. Something that surprised me about this omnibus edition is that it’s still presented in the flipped-art format that it used when the individual volumes were first published in the ‘90s, meaning it reads from left to right like an American comic.

What's Michael?, Vol. 1 by Makoto Kobayashi