The Evil Secret Society of Cats Vol. 1

I enjoyed the cute artwork and the humor, but I hate the layout design. Having vertical text disrupted my reading flow until I decided to ignore it altogether. I missed out on some insight and jokes, but I couldn’t be bothered to keep flipping the page

The Evil Secret Society of Cats is all around us. Their goal is to teach humans to fear the feline race...by taking over our lives with their cuteness. If you've ever been late to leave the house because of a cat who was too cute not to pet, you've experienced the Society's nefarious activities. (Or you're a human member of the Society, because that's an option too.) Some recurring characters are: Feline Commander (the leader of the secret society), Dr. Meow (the cat who develops all of the society's technologies), Queen (a high-level cat operative), the Destroyer (a secretly sweet former stray cat), Robocat (a robot created by Dr. Meow), and the hero Doggoman and Doggoman's little sister. There's also a hedgehog cafe owner who pops up show more occasionally, and who reminded me of the Cat's Cafe comic.

Do you like Bananya but wish it focused more on cat behavior as opposed to "cat who lives in a banana" behavior, while still retaining some of that series' quirkiness? If so, then this series may be for you. I enjoyed the cat-related humor but found the experience of reading the whole volume in one sitting to be a bit like shoving a huge wad of cotton candy in my mouth. It was very cute and sweet and about as substantial.

Which is fine! Sometimes you want something that's sweet and light and doesn't have anything more stressful than a cat who's a little wistful that she wasn't adopted by a particular person. I'd probably have been better off reading smaller portions of this over a longer period of time, though.

The characters are all pretty basic, but if I had to pick a favorite, it'd probably be the Destroyer. He's one of my favorite types: the tough guy who's actually a secret softy. You can bet he'll always be there to watch out for the elderly lady who took him in and gave him a home. Even if that doesn't technically qualify as villainous Secret Society behavior.

Whatever. It's not like the Secret Society is all that villainous when it comes down to it.

The artwork was full-color and reminded me of Neko Atsume, although I don't think Pandania had anything to do with that game.

Extras:

A one-page comic style afterword by the author, and a "bonus artwork" gallery that features additional artwork and some enlarged panels from the comic.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.) show less

This is cute and made me laugh out loud in places (especially the "footnotes" on the sides of some of the comics), but this is definitely better suited for reading in small chunks; it's a lot of single-page comics and it is possible to consume too many in one sitting.

Cute and a little campy, playful - the villainous society of cats indeed! Stealing our hearts, our minds, our time, our laundry. . . etc.

There are some cute characters, and the backstory on how some of them got to where they are was fun! Silly and amusing, but perhaps best read in little bits, or the lack of substance can start to feel a little checked out. The layout is also not the easiest at times (in the original Japanese, it was likely easy to read the titles and the little bonus bits vertically on either side of the strips; in English it either slows down processing to angle perception, or requires tilting the book).

There are a handful of named and recurring characters, but of those only a few feel more than one-dimensional show more (Queen, the Destroyer, for example), and all the "human society members" (the humans in general) felt very interchangeable/background to me, which made it less engaging overall.

Personally I found I prefer Pandania's other cat-centric series, Yokai Cats, much more. show less

The good:
The commentaries were humorous
The illustrated cats were very cute
Many of the things they do are very connected to real cat behavior

The meh:
The illustration set up was rather small and harder to follow
It began becoming repetitive with storylines
It did not have a lot of decent connections
Too many characters thrown in with irregular backstory follow ups.
Kind of messy to follow overall.