I recently finished Kazuo Umezu's Cat Eyed Boy, a character who is reminiscent of Umezu's Orochi and perhaps adolescent Hellboy. The complete series is compiled in two books.
Before summer began, Volume 1's longer form story, The Band of One Hundred Monsters left me unimpressed with the series (though the shorter tales The Immortal Man, The Ugly Demon, The Tsunami Summoners, and the The One-Legged Monster of Oudai were very impressive!)
So with some lackluster effort, I dug into book 2 during summer break. The first half of the volume concludes The Band of 100 Monsters and another longer form story, The Meatball Monster. Both tales meander and are directionless in a very long, drawn out manner. My hopes for Cat Eyed Boy's quality continued dwindling.
However! Volume 2's final five, shorter stories - The Thousand-Handed Demon, The Stair, The Promise, The Hand and The Friend - are incredibly memorable and invigorate what made Umezu so special to me in the first place. It was a strong finish to the series.
In finishing the books, I was finally able to watch without fear of spoilers (though I now realize in viewing, that the series is completely separate from the manga) on YouTube episodes of the 1976 series, Ghost Story: Cat Eyed Boy. The form of storytelling is compelling. Not animated, but rather puppetry of painted illustrations integrated with smoke, water, glittery reflected lighting and more. There were 26,15-minute episodes created and I've watched two 24-minute installments, so It's not clear to me how many original episodes that would be - probably four?
