Igor Planter

Evil-doer
Full Name	Igor Planter
Alias	None
Origin	Black Cat (anime adaptation)
Occupation	Gardener Escaped convict
Powers / Skills	Creating and controlling plants Can turn into a plant-like hybrid
Hobby	Gardening
Goals	To live in his greenhouse without human disturbance
Crimes	Murder spree
Type of Villain	Eco-Freak

Igor Planter is a minor villain who appears in one episode of the anime adaptation of the manga Black Cat. He is one of the many criminals who broke out of jail thanks to the Apostles of the Star, who intended to recruit new members among them.

Background

When freed, Igor goes to a greenhouse where he starts working, but he now has a 400,000 yens bounty on his head, and the protagonists (who are bounty hunters) are tracking him down, so does the thief-for-hire Rinslet Walker, who works for the secret society Chronos and suspects that he might be linked to the Apostles of the Star.

Charden Flamberg and Kyoko Kirisaki from the Apostles visit him and make him drink Shinkito (Spirit Drink) a potion that awakes a power of Tao so that he would join them, but Igor is not interested.

Characteristics

At first glance, Igor appears to be a kind man, polite and mild-spoken, who only wants to live peacefully with his family, and who tells Charden that he was wrongly convicted and never committed any crime. However, when Eve manages to find the greenhouse where he is hiding, it is revealed that what he calls his family are the plants and the flowers he is growing, and that he did not commit crimes... judging from his point of view.

In fact, he is a deranged eco-freak with no regard for human life. Whenever someone damages a plant before his eyes (this goes as far as stepping on the lawn, picking a flower or cutting a leaf) he will stop at nothing to punish the offender by taking their life, without even considering the disproportion between the "crime" and the "sentence".

Igor wields the power to create and control plants and vegetations. He can make vines and roots erupt from the ground and direct them at will, grow monstrous plants under his control, usually of the man-eating sort, and generate pollens and pheromones.

Role in the Story

As Eve made a bet with Train that she could catch Igor first, she finds him in his greenhouse. Igor starts a rather friendly conversation with her about his garden and the plants he is growing, during which she realizes the full extent of his madness.

Disturbed, Eve walks backwards away from him, but she damages a flower without noticing it and Igor resolves to "punish" her. He uses his newfound power to create and control plants, a power which he uses to sprout huge vines from the floor, and to give birth to huge and monstrous plants that he controls and uses as weapons. As Igor has captured Eve and is about to feed her to a gigantic carnivorous plant, Train appears and engages a fight against the deranged gardener.

Plant-like Igor

At first, Igor is no match for the legendary Black Cat but the more he drinks Shinkito, the mightier he becomes, and he even ends up transforming into a huge plant-like mutant. Igor blinds Train with a cloud of pollen and binds him with vines, intending to crush him to death but this is not enough to defeat Train. Now completely mad, Igor ends up drinking the entire bottle of Shinkito, which proves to be his undoing and he ultimately dies, because his body could not bear the amount of potion that he drank.

Trivia

• It must be noted that the way the Shinkito works in the anime is widely incoherent in regard to the manga. In the manga, those who drink it fall into a coma. If they have a dormant power of Tao, they will awake within a few days, able to use it and if they do not they die. On the contrary, in the anime when someone with a dormant power drinks Shinkito, the power is awakened shortly after and the drinker must take another sip to stabilize it. Moreover, in the manga drinking more Shinkito is useless and a power of Tao does not transform its wielder.