The Webcomics Weekly is back in your life. This week, Michael Mazzcane brings you a magical realist story about a cat, a girl, her family, and the magical adventure they went on one summer. Need I say more? Well, obviously there’s a review written below.
Tata the Cat
Episodes 1-5
Schedule: Mondays
By Suwan Kim(story) Subin Kim(art)
Reviewed by Michael Mazzacane
Sometimes you just want a cozy webcomic to read. That’s what “Tata the Cat” is, cozy. Which is perhaps a strange adjective to use given the warm weather in Southern California at the moment. It’s just a nice warm easy-going strip that isn’t trying to be yet another isekai, at least not yet one can never be too sure with that genre; truck-kun lurks behind every corner. Those cozy qualities though are not to dismiss some of the design elements of this strip, but instead to recognize how it overall comes together to effect a sensibility on me as a reader where I don’t all that mind.
The obvious point of reference for the way this series opens is Spirited Away and once the titular cat, Tata, comes into play there is a My Neighbor Totoro magical realist energy to it. From that lens, the creative team do a good job of putting forward a Ghibli-esque tone, with a few notable inversions. Unlike at the start of Spirited Away our lead character Suyeon can’t wait to get to the countryside and spend time with grandma. The opening panels as Suyeon walks down the road to her Grandmothers captures the both the sense of heat but also the monotony of walking this lonely road.
The repetitive “buzz” lettering does a surprising amount of work in these panels. This sequence and others like it highlight the aesthetic choices being made by Subin Kim. Their environmental is phenomenal even when thehy cartoon things out into the distance the layouts of these spaces is excellent. Their use of shadow makes their overall hue of their palette pop. They are also layered in a few more shades which gives the environment a sense of depth and dimension, it’s all still clearly cartooned but it is done in a style meant to evoke realisim. These moments also highlight how flat and cartooned the character models are. While sometimes this aesthetic choice is effective, see Suyeon melting and dripping sweat in the first strip, it creates this feeling of disconnect with the rest of the strip. Plainly the cartooning on the characters just seems haphazard at first and harsh compared to the really thoughtful environment design. It doesn’t help that the staging in the paneling is fairly formulaic, not necessarily bad but nothing every really pops.
The human characters are all extremely flat and weirdly posed, it didn’t make sense. And than the titular cat showed up and these choices all began to make more sense. The harsh juxtaposition between the human characters and nature, the supernatural nature by comparison, is a way to represent the magical realisim of the strip. Aesthetically the strip might not be for everyone, my usual critiques about strip design and paneling all come up here. But than that darn cat shows up, and, well just look at those eyes!
Subin Kim knows how to draw Tata and with that this strip will be more than fine. That cat is adorable even as it doesn’t do much, it is a cat after all. But in doing those cat things just maybe turned up a few degrees, because technically this cat was reborn out of a flower, it gives the strip a cozy episodic format that is largely oriented in what will this cat do now. There is a serializaed story as the rest of the family is reintroduced to the cat but it is more episodic than not.
This isn’t going to blow anyones minds but man sometimes you just wana read a story about a girl and her magical cat one summer.
