Reviews Editor

Leo Brandt

Leo Brandt writes criticism for Catzye, with a bias toward seinen, complex ongoing series, and works that reward close reading. He handles the site’s chapter and volume scorecards and its longer analytical essays.

The byline by its numbers · The Opening

Reduced, this name gives 1. It sits on The Opening with the rest of a first move.

Leo14Brandt23total37 → 1

The reference files it as a first move. The number's contribution is beginnings, leadership, and the will to act alone — and with it the 1's appetite for a clean, decisive beginning, which is the thread the reference follows here.

The Opening — first moves, single authors, and things that had no precedent →

Latest by Leo Brandt

Manga · 8

Part 18: What the Medium Holds Holy

Latest by Leo Brandt

Part 18: What the Medium Holds Holy

The 22 Day: Reading Tuesday's Manga & Anime News Through the Number of Construction

Part 17: The Self Can Be Remade

Part 37: The Page Overrun: Togashi's Textual Onslaught in Hunter x Hunter and the Art of Necessary Compromise

Part 16: Fate and Will, and the Word This Whole Project Was Named After

Part 27: One Word, Two Boys: Suki, and the Retranslation That Proved Nothing Is Neutral

Part 35: Fujimoto’s Surgical Cuts: Pacing Grief and Guts on the Page

Part 13: Is the World Just?

Part 33: Hagio's Interiors: When the Page Held Two Times at Once

Part 32: Rejecting Polish: The Raw Power of Tekkonkinkreet's Line

Part 309: Freedom, and What It Costs: Attack on Titan, the Number 5, and the Boy Who Wanted Out

Part 21: The Man Who Was Tetsuwan Atom: Frederik Schodt and the Author Nobody Names

Part 20: Naruto Is a Fish Cake: The Names They Kept and Ruined Anyway

Part 7: The Self Is Finished in the Group

Part 306: The Visionary Nobody Believed: Naruto Uzumaki and the Master Number of the Outcast

Part 19: Oni Is Not a Demon: The Bestiary That Arrives as Fantasy

Part 6: The Rubble Under Everything

Part 27: Junji Ito's Surgical Scare: How Impeccable Lines and Page Turns Twist the Reader

Part 18: The Works That Never Crossed: Doraemon, Sazae-san, and the Negative Space

Part 304: The Builder of a New World: Death Note, Light Yagami, and the Number of the Methodical God

Part 17: The Compression Nobody Notices: What Subtitles Delete

Part 25: Toriyama’s Clarity – The Unseen Engineering of Legible Fury

Part 23: When the Page Resists: Deconstructing Manga's Failures in Clarity

Part 9: The English That Japan Wrote: Neon Genesis Evangelion and the Title That Is Greek

Part 8: The Title That Was a Spoiler: Attack on Titan and the Virtue of Bad English

Part 7: The Two Syllables That Carry a Plot: Honorifics and the Social Calculation

Part 293: The Bird Drawn Small: Goodnight Punpun, Inio Asano, and the Analyst Who Sees Too Much

Part 6: The Sound That Is Drawn: Onomatopoeia, and the Word for Silence

Part 13: The Unseen Weight: How Black Ink Shapes Manga's Soul

Part 4: The Triple Nine and the Dub That Buried It: Ghost Stories and Honest Vandalism