(C) BoingBoing This story was originally published by BoingBoing and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . In Lynx, a cybernetic cat solves murders next to killer angels [1] ['Gareth Branwyn'] Date: 2026-08-17 I knew I was going to like Lynx the moment I encountered the cybernetically-enhanced, be-goggled, crime-fighting talking cat. Sometimes you just know. Lynx, the new tech-noir manga from writer Samuel Sattin (Unico, Buzzing) and Tokyo-based artist tokitokoro (Jeff the Land Shark), is out now on VIZ Originals. It's 224 pages of post-apocalyptic detective fiction full of designer drugs, rogue tech, body horror, mysterious murders, strange angels, and Skua, the aforementioned talking cat. The setup contains familiar cyberpunk DNA. After a global climate catastrophe, humanity has retreated to a handful of habitable places, including the perpetually wintry city of New Borealis. Lynx Takuma is a bio-enhanced detective charged with keeping some semblance of order there, tracking down criminal syndicates and illegal "Qual" tech with her sodden, shell-shocked partner, Task, and Skua. Lynx is also lugging around some serious emotional baggage involving her former lover, Simone, baggage she's doing her damnedest not to unpack. Then the bodies start turning up. The murders are gruesome and strange. Lynx's investigation eventually brings her into contact with something that shouldn't exist in this already profoundly weird world: angels. And these are decidedly not the cherubic, harp-strumming kind. As VIZ's wonderfully pulpy tagline puts it: "Beyond the end of the world, the angels have claws." Sattin keeps the story moving at a satisfying pace, throwing out intriguing bits of the world's technology, history, social structure, and biology as the core story unfolds. There are a lot of mysteries introduced here, but I never felt lost. Where I did frequently feel lost (mostly in the best possible way) was in tokitokoro's extraordinarily trippy, data-dense black-and-white artwork. Many pages are angular, fractured. Panels crash into and overlap one another. Figures appear at odd angles and extreme perspectives. Black shapes cut through fields of white. Some pages feel like looking through shards of broken glass, with each shard offering a different fragment of information. Too often, when reading comics, we rush through pages that artists spent hours lovingly crafting. Here, you can't. You have to stop and ponder some of these puzzling images. On more than one occasion, I found myself turning the book sideways, upside down, even practically 360 degrees, trying to figure out exactly what I was looking at. That might sound like a criticism, and it has been for some readers. Manga action can occasionally become visually opaque even under the best of circumstances, and tokitokoro seems intent on pushing that opacity to the breaking point. It's an interesting fit for a detective story set in a world saturated with unfamiliar technology and altered bodies. Lynx is constantly trying to work out what the evidence in front of her means, and the reader occasionally must do the same with the page itself. I don't know whether that parallel was by design, but I think it works. There's also plenty of breathing room amid all the eyeball kicks. Tokitokoro is especially good with faces and body language, and Sattin wisely gives the characters enough space to establish themselves between the more spiky bits of cyberpunk and high weirdness. Skua, naturally, steals many of the scenes in which he appears. Obvious comparisons have been made to Blade Runner and Naoki Urasawa's Pluto, and VIZ itself recommends Pluto to readers of the series. But Lynx doesn't feel like it's merely rehashing familiar cyberpunk tropes. By the end of volume 1, Sattin and tokitokoro have assembled something stranger: part police procedural, part post-climate-collapse noir, part body-horror mystery, and part supernatural thriller. And they've only begun to explain those weird-ass angels. Lynx, Vol. 1, by Samuel Sattin and tokitokoro, is out now from VIZ Originals. Read a preview and find the book at VIZ Used with permission Used with permission Used with permission Used with permission Used with permission Used with permission. Previously: [END] --- [1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2026/08/17/in-lynx-a-cybernetic-cat-solves-murders-next-to-killer-angel.html Published and (C) by BoingBoing Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/boingboing/