Kuro: The Complete Edition Manga Review (Minor Spoilers)

Synopsis

Coco lives in a mansion with her black cat Kuro. Every day reminds her that cats are strange creatures. They get stuck in bags. They follow you into the bathroom. Sometimes they even grow extra eyes. Who knows what else they can do?

Meanwhile, strange beings stalk the woods outside the mansion. The local townspeople stick to what they know and avoid what’s dangerous. Survival in this world means following the rules. The most important of all: do not step off the path marked in white.

Long, long legs

Everybody who’s owned a cat knows just how weird they are. Sure, they can be cute, cuddly and surprisingly loyal if you spend enough time with them. But they’re also efficient predators that if mismanaged will happily wipe out ecosystems. Not to mention their notably non-human characteristics, like their bodily flexibility, love of tight spaces and fear of cucumbers.

Kuro, a series by the writer/artist duo Somato, asks the question: what if your cat really was an eldritch entity with supernatural powers? The answer is surprisingly mundane. Kuro chases after bugs like any other cat. It hates getting wet and loses focus when stressed. Even its eccentricities, like how it rarely eats from its dish, should be familiar to cat owners.

Of course, most cats can’t grow long, long legs, or impale things with long sharp tendrils from their toothy mouths. Kuro, though, does most cats one better. It’s a truism in cat circles that a big cat will kill smaller prey. Kuro has the power to grow larger than its owner Coco at any time; it is therefore a danger. Yet Kuro does not eat Coco. In fact, it defends her and her friends from threats outside the mansion. Would your own cat do the same? I don’t think so.

Sharp, sharp teeth

Kuro is also a story about learning rules. What is Kuro? Is it the same kind of creature as those outside the mansion? Why doesn’t Coco ever acknowledge those creatures, even though her friends Milque and Maria fear them? Many of the characters in this story know the answers to these questions. Because they live in their world, they expect us to know, and so they do not tell us. The pleasure of this book then is in solving the puzzle while guessing who holds the pieces.

Since it was originally published as a webcomic, Kuro is paced more like a gag comic than traditional story manga. Nearly every page has its own spooky punchline. The exceptions tend to be flashbacks or sidestories. I’m torn on whether this helps or hurts the pacing. While the main story’s slow drip-feed of setting information is well done, the sidestory chapters have the breathing room to go all-in on fantastical scenarios rather than staccato one-off jokes.

Sadly, Kuro’s characters suffer from this approach. Most are archetypal: innocent girl, angry girl, tiny girl. Others have more depth, like the doctor who experiments on the forest entities to protect the townspeople. While I enjoyed learning about the setting through the eyes of these characters, they never came alive for me as tragic figures in their own right. Even the sidestory chapters can only do so much to patch these holes.

Blood black as ink

Unlike other manga series, Kuro is (mostly) in color. While I think the story also could have worked in black and white, Somato leverage color to give the setting personality. The patterned wallpaper and rich browns of the mansion evoke opulence, while the nearby town’s colorful buildings and clothes carry a fairy-tale atmosphere. The corruptive black ink of the entities also stands out that much more.

From a design standpoint, the most iconic character in the story is of course Kuro itself. Its round toothy mouth is grossly insectile and yet also cute when you adjust to it. While Somato stretches its design by having it grow eyes and tendrils, it is always recognizably a cat, even at its most Lovecraftian. The forest entities by comparison are much nastier, with red eyes that burst like pustules into black corruption.

The frisson between frilly Gothic Lolita aesthetics and nightmare creatures is part of what gives the series its charge. Is Kuro really on Coco’s side? Might Coco one day lose herself in the mansion? While the series never descends into deranged territory like Made in Abyss, the potential for horror is always there. The suspense kept me reading to the end but might also turn off some folks tired of stories about virginal young women under threat of infection.

Verdict

Kuro: The Complete Edition is a cute and funny manga about cats with a slow-burn supernatural mystery in the background. While not necessarily complex, I enjoyed my time with it, and would recommend it to readers looking for a stand-alone manga volume with light horror elements. I’m curious to see how Shadows House, Somato’s current ongoing series, builds on what they accomplished here.

If you liked Kuro: The Complete Edition, you might also like…

• Shadows House by Somato
• The Girl From the Other Side by Nagato
• Beautiful Darkness by Marie Pommepuy and Fabien Vehlmann

Credits

Story & Art: Somato [Story and Design by Nori, Art by Hisshi] Translation: Taylor Engel
Lettering: Abigail Blackman
Published in English by Yen Press

Thank you to Yen Press for providing an advance review copy of this manga. Receiving an advance copy had no impact on the reviewer’s opinions.

Article edited by: Bill Curtis