Black Cat (Vol. 19) – Kentaro Yabuki
Published by Viz

In true shonen style, the final confrontation the second half of this series has been leading up to, continues on for yet another volume. Good or bad thing?

While my fondness for the lead characters is often enough to easily cancel out annoyance at repetitiveness, in this particular volume the majority of page time went to the fight between the Chrono Numbers’ leader, Sephiria Arks, and the series’ top-honcho bad guy, Creed. Yes, you both look cool and have some neat attacks, and are doing the usual bad and forth banter with expected snark, but I was still never attached or invested enough in either of the characters to make this showdown all that interesting.

In a book that really played itself on this fight, I was still more interested in the, albeit short, scenes that take us back to the title three: Train, Sven and adorably kick-butt little Eve. The remaining bad guys pull out some more surprises to hold them up but they’re determined to make sure Train has the final confrontation with Creed so they can settle old scores. It’s too bad though that old fears of mine have come true and all secondary characters have suddenly become completely obsolete (and absent).

But don’t get me wrong, sure I didn’t really care a whole lot about the big fight scene in this, but said fight scene was still pretty cool and finally seeing Train face to face against Creed once again was more exciting than I thought it’d be. Kentaro Yabuki’s fantastic artwork can be most credited for this (as well as having a really awesome cover image). At the end of the book is a short story showing how Train and Sven met, a fun little bonus for sure, and also helped ease the bit of disappointment I held for lacking character time in the rest of the volume.

The end of Black Cat is in sight and as much as some of these recent volumes have sagged a bit on my interests, I’ll still be heartbroken when it’s all over.

Review written March 16, 2009 by Lissa Pattillo
Book purchased in-store from Chapters

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About the Author: Lissa Pattillo

Lissa Pattillo is the owner and editor of Kuriousity.ca. Residing in Halifax, Nova Scotia she takes great joy in collecting all manners of manga genres, regretting that there's never enough time in the day to review or share them all. Along with reviews, Lissa is responsible for all the news postings to the website and works full time as a web and graphic designer.