GIRL MEETS CAT

Move over Garfield, there is a sassy new orange kitty in town.

In this abundantly cute French import, Cat, a young girl with gravity-defying salmon-hued pigtails, lives with her single father and their mischievous, apricot-striped cat, Sushi. As seen in a series of rib-tickling, mostly one-page vignettes, Sushi engages in all the lovably predictable kitty behavior feline aficionados would expect: scratching up the walls and curtains and commandeering the best seat in the house. In one memorable episode, Cat tries unsuccessfully to keep Sushi from clawing the carpet and consequently angering her father, so she conspicuously rearranges the room to hide the offending spots, leaving the living room in comic disarray. Each graphic-format page is styled with small, mostly borderless bubblelike panels and relies on a barrage of episodic sight gags with a high-energy palette of sugary pinks, cheerful blues, and citrusy greens. Imagination runs unfettered, from both Cat’s and Sushi’s perspectives. Sushi is an indoor cat (with only the occasional jaunt through his cat door), so most of his adventures are rather insular and almost exclusively involve only Cat and her father, who are both white. The few additional humans depicted are mostly white and usually slender.

Cat fans should find plenty to purr about.