C.A.T.

Our titular Cat is a female mercenary with moniker fitting her enhanced body, which moves as quick and gracefully as a cat. An orphan who was picked up by a shady department of the U.S. government and turned into a killing machine, she broke out as a teen and has spent the rest of her life as a freelance agent. Currently, her employer is the C.I.A. In opposition to her is Hao Long, a skilled assassin from China who works in conjunction with his hacker sister, and Russia’s BEAR unit, a group of three heavily augmented death row inmates working for the government. These three groups intersect on a train, with deadly and explosive results.

C.A.T. – Confidential Assassination Troop

「密殺戰群」
Fung Chin Pang

Read Online: MangaFox

As it turns out, they are all being manipulated by Alvas, a genius who is currently the director of the C.I.A. –and also the man behind the project that created Cat. He has his own agenda. Unfortunately, we don’t get to see much of what it is because the manga goes on hiatus after its second volume. Its been on hiatus for years, so its probably safe to say that the creator has forgotten about it. He has a DeviantArt and a Pixiv account, which are somewhat regularly updated, and he seems to be working as an illustrator for some novels and PC games, so its probably safe to assume he’s too busy for graphic novel work. Or maybe it doesn’t pay as well. Either way, it sucks and I would really love to see C.A.T. properly completed. I’m sure plenty of other people would too.

As readers can see, Fung Chin Pang’s art is incredibly similar to the art of Samura Hiroaki, the mangaka behind Blade of the Immortal. Most people would think the art is by the same person. Thankfully, either due to Fung’s personal taste or China’s censoring of such works, Fung doesn’t share Samura’s taste for misogynistic ero-guro artwork. (Fung does have a series of images from an artbook on prostitutes, but none of them stray into ero-guro territory.) Needless to say, the art is amazing. The gritty, sketchy style fits with the story itself. (It gets sketchier and gritter in volume two.)

As for the story… Well, the first volume starts off with a bang. Its mostly action-action-action. Cat busting Moses Stanley out of his prison. Cat duking it out with Hao Long and the BEAR unit on a moving train. Cat fighting the three BEARs in an abandoned building in Moscow. There is a little backstory, character development and whatnot, but I will admit that some of it is a little rushed, cliched and/or awkward. I’ll put that down the Fung’s newness to the world of graphic novels and won’t hold it against him. All-in-all, volume one is very good and it keeps a reader interested.

Volume two, however… Its still good, but it starts to become obvious that Fung knows the series is going to be put on the backburner. I’m not sure if it was stopped of his own accord or if he was having issues with the company producing the series, but either way, a reader does getting the feeling that things are a bit rushed. Granted, that might also be attributed to Fung’s newness to the genre, who knows? Either way, the second volume isn’t quite as good as the first and it introduces a lot of new ideas and plot twists, which makes it far more unfortunate that it ended so soon. Or, excuse me, went on an indefinite hiatus.

Now that I’ve gone over the arty-ploty shit, lets go over the characters. Let me just say that, for the most part, I like Cat. Her backstory is kinda cliched (I see shade of O-Ren Ishii from Kill Bill in it) and so is some of the stuff between her and Gum Joe Yee, but I like her. She knows how to kick ass and take names. Watching her fight is pretty damn awesome too. Very acrobatic. I like Hao Long and would like to see more of him, though I am more than a little annoyed about his reaction to what happened to his sister. (His sister makes herself a combatant and gets pissed someone fights back against her. Seriously, what the fuck did he expect?) However, he goes beyond his grudge against Cat and is intelligent enough to see that they all are being manipulated. The BEARs are more-or-less “meh” to me, though Golem seems at least somewhat interesting. Probably because he also seems to be the more intelligent one of the group. Alvas and his Russian counterpart, Polguschev… They don’t interest me much. (Alvas design is pretty hot, but he’s kind of a ruthless dickface, so it doesn’t matter.) Gum Joe Yee seems to be fairly interesting, though I probably would think more of his if I didn’t suspect he was the rooftop sniper in Moscow.

/ 6 Commentsleave a comment /

• Grim says:

  October 15, 2010

  The art work looks sick and it sounds kind of interesting so I think I might check this out thx.

  Reply
  • morri says:

    October 24, 2010

    Please do! Its nothing brilliant, but its worth a read.

    The only major drawback is that it "ends" too soon.

    Reply
• kluxorious says:

  October 21, 2010

  Holy shit, how the fuck did I miss this post? That manga looks freaking shiznit. If anything I would read it for the artwork alone. Damn… that's hot

  Reply
  • morri says:

    October 24, 2010

    I can only assume you missed it because your awesome detecting radar was broken. You should get that fixed ASAP.

    And, yes, this manga is fappable.

    Reply
• Mesapholis says:

  May 12, 2011

  soo…nobody knows whether it will continue?? cause i am going crazy about this sketchy style, the pictures look awesom

  Reply
• Nyntar says:

  June 26, 2011

  anywhere I can buy this? or will it just be from scanlations?

  Reply