4 out of 5

This is so dumb. And I don’t think writer ‘Hawkman’ is denying that, instead embracing the dumbness (and every possible Night of the Living Dead zombie trope he can) for greedy, glorious yuks, while backfilling his tale of infectious cats with character and story. That is: flipping the typical script such that the loving nuzzle of a feline turns you into a feline is undeniably mined for genre parody (and genre-adjacent ones), stacked on by translating cute cat traits into ‘threatening’ zombie ones, but there’s always contextual grounding for these gags, and character-specific responses – the jokes work in tandem with the story. 

So you are giggling the whole way through getting to know our cat cafe workers, framed by a flash forward to later in the ‘catdemic’ when they’re more fully informed about how to defend themselves, and then rewinding to walk us through the viral kickoff, and sprinkle in cat facts along the way.  

There’s a precarious line between silly and stakes that will be hard to maintain – like, it’s hilarious that the main ‘threat’ is that cats are sooo cute and you feel bad turning them away – but thanks to very energetic and great comedically-timed art from Mecha-Roots, the story is currently able to bounce between these various elements and not tire. The choice to start with the flash forward may also prove dispiriting, depending on how future volumes are handled, but that’s all wait and see – this first collection is incredible fun as-is, wholly aware of itself, but Hawkman and Mecha-Roots still giving it their contextual all on story and art to elevate things way above just one repetitive gag.