I picked up the first book of this two volume omnibus early last year, but I only got around to reading it at the start of this summer. As implied in the title, the series is built upon Michael, a striped tabby who simultaneously inhabits multiple lives. His main world includes a wife and child, but different episodes has him living other households. It isn’t that Michael jumps from place to place, this is a manga of of parallel universes that don’t interact with each other.
Along with Michael are other recurring characters, including a big, fat nemesis named Catzilla, a yakuza boss who is scared that his cat fancy will be outed and his primary rival from the other gang who is cat-phobic, a veterinarian who is on the lam (falsely accused of murder), and a dude-bro who is trying to train his cat to play fetch.
With multiple settings to play with, Kobayashi will occasionally dip into absurdist sequences in alternate realities, including a memorable episode where one of Michael’s owner speculates about Michael’s dreams (spun into a yarn about getting scammed at a nightclub). This series works because of the balance of mundane slices of life with pets and such absurdist moments.
Over the years, I had picked up a couple random thin What’s Michael collections but never read them in sequence. Since each of these shorter books are themselves collections of short vignettes, I didn’t realize that Kobayshi was developing a continuity over the progress of this series. Reading this first volume made me aware of my oversight and it has been delightful to see him slowly populate this world. I’ll be curious what he will do with these multiple threads in the second volume of this omnibus.
Aside from a couple panels, the book generally is appropriate for kids except for our However, I can’t help my American squeamishness about such subjects, so I’ll hold off on giving her this book for maybe another couple years, partly because she has plenty of other comics. Even so, I’ll most likely pick up the second volume of this omnibus (coming out in late August). I ant to complete the pairing to see how he ties up the loose ends with this manga’s run.