How to Tell If Your Cat Is Plotting to Kill You

by The Oatmeal and Matthew Inman

[Amber (The Literary Phoenix)]

It’s complicated to review comic book like this because it really all comes down to someone’s sense of humor. There’s no coherent plot, because it’s just a set of humorous strips. Add to that the fact that Matthew Inman – aka The Oatmeal – is a web comic, then reading one of his books probably seems kind pointless, right? Why bother with the book when at least 75% of the content is available for free online?

I’ve been following The Oatmeal for a decade and his comics have always made me smile. I’ve thought about acquiring one of his books for YEARS and just never got around to it. He actually just announced a new book, and so I figured, why not? Buying books like this is a great way to support the artist, and at any rate I tend to revisit comics when I’m feeling a little blue.

How To Tell If Your Cat is Plotting to Kill You has some great comics, and some that weren’t to my taste. I will say that about 60% (possibly more) of this book is made up of a mini-series called the Bob Cats. I don’t like the Bob Cats. They’re two office cats who are basically major jerks. Sometimes, they do things that are catlike behavior, but for the most part, they’re just being jerks to the humans they work with. They would have been super fired in real life and I just didn’t find their sections funny. I was more bored and vaguely annoyed.

My favorite panels in here are probably from the collections “How to Tell If Your Cat is Gay”. This section is so much more vibrant than the rest of the book, and there’s an actual point to the collection. A lot of How to Tell If Your Cat is Plotting to Kill You is just silliness and cat collections/panels (makes sense, given the book theme). This particular collection is a bit more educational in nature. In my opinion, Inman’s most successful comics in general are his more educational ones.

Overall a fun, quick read. If you look at this as a full comic collection, I don’t think this is his strongest work, but like I said… I don’t like the Bob Cats and they made up more than half this book. So others may disagree with me. Still, it was funny, and I don’t regret owning the book.