easy reader

Bath-time Boots
FSG 1997
16 pages
(board book)


Me and My Cat?
FSG 1999
26 pages




The Comic Adventures of Boots
FSG 2002
32 pages



If I had one wish for a new release in children's publishing it would be a thick graphic novel of the continuing adventures of Kitamura's cats. Nothing less than 150 pages will do. I am serious.

Utilizing a simple watercolor-fill drawing style, bordering on cartoon, Kitamura delves into the world of Boots and his friends that could only come from someone who has lived with and knows the ways cats. They aren't always cute, they aren't always smart or dignified, and quite often in their attempts to remain aloof and autonomous they manage to land themselves in bigger trouble than they had hoped to avoid.
Bath-time Boots is a board book that mirrors the childhood game of avoid-the-bath. Boots spends the entire time desperately looking for hiding spaces that cannot save him until, in a final act of desperation, he jumps straight into a tub full of water as a last-ditch effort. Nothing too sophisticated, just a simple observation of a cat's hatred for the bath and the propensity for trying to put themselves into places they obviously cannot fit. Cats in sinks? I rest my case.

With Me and My Cat? Kitamura expands on the idea of trading places when a witch enters and switches the brains of Boots' friend Leonardo and his boy owner. When the boy-in-the-cat watches himself eat out of a cat dish and get pushed off to school he decides to make the most of it by trying the life of a cat. He jumps on the furniture and knocks things over. He explores the neighborhood from atop a wall and discovers just how unfriendly the neighborhood cats are toward one another. Then, back at home, he watches as the cat-in-boy sits with that crazy cat expression on his face licking himself clean. The doctor is called and the prescription is rest. That night the witch comes back to correct her mistake and Leonardo and the boy are back to normal.

What isn't as apparent in the first two books becomes clear in The Comic Adventures of Boots when Kitamura opens the door wide into the fully developed world of Boots and his friends. While boots is the star, Leonardo is also along, as are the bully cats from before who now have names like Vincent and Pablo and Hokusai. And where the earlier books would simply illustrate their stores, here they are practically animated as they stroll along with upwards of a dozen panels per page. In three separate tales (plus three single-page silent catering and endpapers that are practically flip books) Boots manages to outsmart the other cats (almost) to get his special warm place on a wall, befriends a duck who saves his life and teaches him to swim, and enlists the other cats in an elaborate game of charades which is far more clever than any dozens of comics I've seen aimed at kids.

Sight gags worthy of silent films of Buster Keaton, colorfully rendered are that is deceptive in it's simplicity, and a revealing look into the secret world we always knew cats inhabited. More like this, please.