| Mobu’s Diary – Earning Your Paté, Vol.1 by Kathy Lam ARC was provided by the Publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own. |
Description
Mobu is a shy, three-year-old calico who’s had enough of her comfortable but repetitive life as a house cat. Determined to become independent, she decides to apply for a job at a cat café — despite her anxious nature and secret love of napping. Kathy Lam’s charming graphic novel debut is a funny, warm-hearted story for animal lovers of every age.
Mobu’s Diary ARC Review
Mobu’s Diary is a full-color manhua created during 2020, by Kathy Lam. It’s a story dedicated to the author’s own cat, named Mobu.
Mobu is an anxious, introverted three-year-old calico cat with white fur, gray-brown spots, pink toe beans, and a round shape like a rice ball.
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Tired of her cozy but repetitive daily routine — sleeping, eating, and playing with her blue ball — she wants a job, just like a dog, and decides it’s time to become self-sufficient by getting one.
So she asks her owner to help her look for jobs in a cat’s newspaper. She’s immediately drawn to a job offer for Neko Café, which is looking for new cats to entertain humans.
Despite her fear of strangers, she puts together a résumé — claiming she “enjoys interacting with humans” — and heads to the interview, bringing her friend, Jackie, along with her.
Lisa, the café’s owner, interviews them both — and guess how it turns out? They both join the team! From here on, their adventure as café cats begins.
The cats Kathy Lam draws are humanized: they interact with people, and above all, they’re spitting images of their own owners.
The world of cats turns out to be not so different from our own.
At its heart, this is a witty, no-frills story that teaches us not to stay stuck in our home routine, but to get out there and find a job!
Finding a position helps us overcome our fears, meet new people and even help them.
Perhaps the author herself struggled with the drastic isolation of the lockdown.
Conclusion
I enjoyed her artwork, and I appreciated the details at the end of each chapter — for example, Mobu drawn as a bee, or the bonus chapter where Mobu wants to become an influencer, or the illustrated pages featuring Mobu’s friends.
I also loved the artist’s interview, through which I discovered she loves drawing capybaras — perhaps she’ll create a capybara story sometime in the future!
I recommend this graphic novel to cat lovers and pet-comic fans.
Rating: 3.5
About Kathy Lam
Kathy Lam was born in Hong Kong and graduated from the Illustration Department of the University of Brighton in the United Kingdom.
In 2023, she was shortlisted for the 14th Golden Comic Awards and represented Taiwan at the 2024 Angoulême International Comics Festival in France.
Mobu’s Diary has been translated into ten languages, including Japanese, Korean, Thai, English, French, Italian, German, Simplified Chinese, Russian, and Ukrainian.
Now, she lives in Taiwan.