Kuro: A Cute But Melancholy Gothic Fantasy Manga
I've just finished reading the new physical omnibus of the gothic fantasy/horror manga Kuro by the manga team "Somato" (also authors of Shadows House), published in English in May this year by Yen Press. I really enjoyed it, and wanted to give it a very strong recommendation.
Kuro is the story of the orphan girl Coco and her cat Kuro. Seemingly without Coco realising it, her cat has been replaced by some sort of Eldritch horror monster, who defends her from the invisible monsters or demons that surround their isolated mansion.
What starts as a series of short comic strips in the vein of Mieruko-Chan or Courage the Cowardly Dog - where Coco is oblivious to the dangers and Kuro has to defend her in various ways - develops into a very serious dark fantasy, with some interesting and detailed world building that not only explains why Coco is living alone with her cat thing and why she cannot see the monsters, but also many other details about this quite dark and depressing early 1900s-like world.
The later volumes become a single long storyline, interspersed with short stories of the world around, as well as illustrated versions of Coco's fantasy stories about her adventures with Kuro. What's quite nice is that we never quite know what's a jumbled or surpressed memory surfacing as a story and what's Coco's fantasy; there are many hints that her "fictional stories" have a lot of truth in them.
The ending is quite satisfying, as Coco is forced to face up to the fact that her demon pet isn't the Kuro that was there when her parents were alive, to come to terms with how her friends are affected by Kuro and the house she lives in, and also to face that her parents are dead and she needs to grow up now.
This physical deluxe Omnibus is the complete Kuro manga (minus the Shadows House crossover I think? I haven't read that manga to recognise the characters). Many sections are printed in colour, which adds to the beautiful art as well as giving some pages a sense of age by styling them like old photographs.
There are some slight negatives - the 'horror', aside from a general dread, is limited; there are a couple of very effective "jump scare panels" and pretty mild gore. It's also probably not going to appeal to the Starving Anonymous/Dead Tube/Shintaro Kago fans. Also the story is relatively short, and the earliest 'gag' strips have a very different humorous tone from the final third.
But if you want a quiet, fun, gothic horror which builds into a neat Victorian fantasy world, filled with the sadness of people trying their best to survive and support an orphan girl in a disaster of a place, then this is absolutely for you.
(And if you like cats, cute but sad little girls and/or Japanese ghost monsters, then go buy this now.)