An interesting concept that doesn’t quite come together as intended; still worth a look, though.
What They Say:
A roving black cat guides readers of domestiCATed: Paths Once Crossed through the nefarious underbelly of domestic human existence as told through three noir-styled, short stories which illustrate that ordinary domestication often contains a dark side.
Technical:
A short graphic novel of only 95 pages, domestiCATed: Paths Once Crossed is a nice, compact little collection. I love the cover art, which has a shadow outline of the black cat over a scene of the neighborhood he roams through the stories.
Inside, the artwork is not particularly clean—plenty of rough edges—a nice choice for the dark subject matter. The whole comic is black-and-white, a virtual necessity for noir comics, and makes some good use of negative space for effect. Another interesting choice is that the shading is done like old-school newsprint, which might have been a choice of cost, but also fits in well with the old-fashioned story form.
My only real complaint with the presentation of the novel is an overuse of some visual techniques, particularly the slow zoom. These sorts of things have some nice effect in low doses, but they show up a little too regularly for my taste.
The Review:
domestiCATed: Paths Once Crossed is a collection of three short stories, all told through the perspective of a black cat. In the prologue, the owner of the cat attempts to kill it by tying it in a bag and tossing it off a bridge into a river, but the cat manages to escape. The overall storyline here is the cat’s journey back home. During that journey, he observes a few situations that, on the surface, appear to be normal, but each have a dark understory. Being a cat, he is able to unobtrusively discover the truth behind each story before moving onto his next stop.
Frankly, it is a pretty neat idea. Each chapter opens with a quote that helps introduce the major theme from the upcoming story, then we get a good run of some of the baser actions of humanity: infidelity, blackmail, murder, etc. And as we are getting these stories from the perspective of the cat, we are seeing them unfiltered; the cat doesn’t judge, he just observes and leaves it up to the reader to draw any conclusions.
As I said, this is a great idea in theory, but it unfortunately doesn’t come together quite the way it is intended. The major flaw is with the second of the three stories. The first story, “Man in the Mirror,” is about a wife whose husband catches her cheating, while the third, “The Black Cat,” is a direct recreation of Poe’s story of the same name. Both have a strong theme of deception and hidden truths wrapped up in a conflict that needs resolution. In other words, both stories are full and proper stories.
But the second story, “The Solitary Woman,” has the same theme of deception and hidden truths, but there is no true conflict that the story attempts to resolve. Instead, we discover what it is the main character is hiding, and the cat moves on before anything can be accomplished to right any potential wrongs. A story needs a conflict that gets a resolution to actually be a story; this one does not have that, and it throws the feeling of the entire novel.
The other issue with this graphic novel is that I would have liked to have seen more of a unifying theme for the stories. Part of this might be the lack of real progress in the second story; part of it might also just be the short length. I see a lot of potential in this construct that I think can be explored a lot more than these three short stories do. I am big into symbolism, and the prologue proclaims, “A cat has nine lives. For three he plays, for three he strays, and for the last three he stays.” I love that line, but to me, that should lead into a collection of nine stories rather than three stories.
And with more stories, perhaps a bit more unity can be built between the stories. Right now, only the cat observing the general dark side of human nature brings these stories together. What I would have liked to have seen is a stronger narrative flow that could be woven through all of the stories, and given us something more to latch onto that just the cat being present. Give me more of a reason to see how the stories fit together better, and this goes from just a neat concept to a really good book.
In Summary:
domestiCATed: Paths Once Crossed has a really solid concept, decent story-telling, and some really fitting artwork, but to me, it reads a bit more like a rough draft at the moment. It feels unfinished, as I think there is a lot more that can be done with the concepts to really bring these stories out into their full potential. It is definitely well worth a look, but I’d like to see the idea revisited to see if it can reach its full potential. If so, it could be something really special. As it is right now, it is merely pretty good. Recommended.
Grade: B