A couple of years ago, Shifty Look, a site that hosted web comics, started featuring strips and other media like web animated series with various Namco game characters.  Many of these characters were very obscure ones, like Bravoman, Klonoa, Wonder Momo, etc.  I’m a classic Namco game junkie so I loved seeing all this happen.  I always wondered how they made money doing this, but I guess they didn’t make enough because sadly, Shifty Look closed its doors about a year or so ago.  I’m not sure if you can still read their comics online, but they did team up with Udon Entertainment to bring some of their Namco series to hardcover book collections.  Last year I reviewed the books based on Bravoman and Wonder Momo (I got a press release a while back that the Bravoman book won some sort of children’s book award in Canada).  And recently I just got a book with a collection of comics based around one of my favorite Namco games: Katamari Damacy!  So here’s a review of the Katamari: Volume One book!

The comic is based on the Prince’s adventures and the writers did a good job keeping it focused on the games.  The Prince would solve problems and save the day by rolling things up in a Katamari, but the comic also fleshed out other characters, too, such as the King of All Cosmos and the other cousins.  Even minor characters made appearances, like Jumboman and the little girl who could “feel the cosmos.”  Anyway, here is a bigger picture of the front of the book.

The first couple of pages have an intro to the comic as well as a bit of history of the Katamari games.  I was impressed they mentioned all the games, including the ones on iOS.  Unfortunately, I don’t think you can download the iOS ones anymore, but I bet they’re like the regular games anyway.  I wish Bandai Namco would make a Wii U Katamari game.  They kind of overdid it with the series a while back, but I think it’s been long enough that a new one is due.  Only problem with the book is that they didn’t mention things like the Prince being a playable racer in Pac-Man World Rally (I think I might be partially responsible for that). But oh well, that’s just being nitpicky on my part.

Here is a sample page of the comic.  You can see some of the familiar characters here.  On every page they have descriptions and insights from the makers of the Katamari comic, and many of them are very educational and insightful.  If you have kids who want to draw comics someday, this would be a good book to get for them to learn some things.

Some of the Katamari comics were just one extra-long vertical panel, so they added an extra fold-out page in the middle to show them.  I thought that was kind of neat that they did that.

And on the last few pages are some random Katamari sketches.

And that’s all in the Katamari comic book!  Only problem I had with it was how they did the text bubbles.  They made them look how they do in the game, which is a neat idea.  But they are so small and hard to read in the book.  I imagine they worked a bit better online, but the print was too small in the book.  But if you like Katamari games, you should try and track down this book anyway.

Tags: Misc