Released on March 25th, 2020
Originally released in Japan in 1998, Cat Shit One is a manga about Vietnam but with animal characters. Why, you might ask, is this being released in the U.S. now, 22 years later? Who the fuck knows. It was already released once in the U.S., in 2004. Now, Antarctic Press is re-releasing it for some reason. And no, I've read comic books for over 30 years and have never heard of Antarctic Press. Who are they? How are they making money if I've never even heard of them? I kind of thought it was difficult to make money in the comic book business, but some unknown publisher exists for 35 years? I'm pretty baffled by this. The only reason I ever even heard of Cat Shit One is because this month there are very few comics being published (mostly from obscure companies like Antarctic Press) and so people are desperately trying to find anything new out there. And maybe if I was a big manga fan I might have heard of this. Cat Shit One was four volumes long and was turned into a computer animated show on Youtube. The only manga I've read have been the titles that have gotten so popular that they end up being somewhat well known in the U.S., things like Death Note, Assassination Classroom, and Attack on Titan. The one reason manga is so popular in Japan is because they're cheap, unlike American comic books which are usually $3.99 for a mere 20 pages. They usually do the gimmick where you buy a fat, monthly book with a bunch of different stories for a cheap price. Then those stories eventually get collected in fat volumes for a pretty cheap price. But Cat Shit One isn't all that great, which is probably why it came out in 1998 and I just heard about it this month. I'm not entirely sure what the point is of showing the Vietnam war with animal soldiers instead of people. Because artist/writer Motofumi Kobayashi thought it was cool and/or different? He is a good artist, although the black and white looks better than the colored version (the last ten pages are colored for some reason). The big problem is that on page 1 we're thrown into the action (and the Vietnam War in these pages is kind of just the usual, cliched, Arnold Schwarzenegger type of all-action, all drama, all over-the-top stuff) without knowing the characters. Since this book did last 4 volumes, I'm guessing eventually you get to know the characters more...but if you don't know who they are then you don't care about them and so the action is meaningless. The Viet Cong are cats and the U.S. soldiers are rabbits ("Cat Shit One" is the U.S. soldier's battalion code name). Maybe there's some profound reasoning behind this, maybe there's some ultimate point I'm missing. But, let's be honest: this entire book is kind of just a stupid idea. *1/2
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