A thug’s life is a hard one: you live on the streets, defend your territory, follow the rules of the group, and who knows where your next meal is coming from! These alley cats are happy with their lives though, as tough as they might be, but it looks like something is about to shake up these punks’ world!
In case anyone was confused by the cover and the title, Nyankees is the story about street cats which view themselves as humans and as such Atsushi Okada draws them both ways. It’s an idea often played for laughs, like when main character Ryuusei finds a comfortable box to sit in, a favorite pastime of cats, and the next panel shows him as a human sitting in the exact same position in the box (which has scaled up to fit with the human proportions in his mind). While the cats clearly view themselves as humans a lot of the time they don’t usually act like humans — like when Ryuusei proposes grooming, curling up, and more with one of the few female characters, when paired with the art it came off as an incredibly creepy move on a (human) female by a (human) male.
As a cat lover, this made for some weird dissonance with the art on a regular basis that made the entire story less fun; I know how cats fight with each other so it was a little jarring to see the cats imagining themselves throwing punches and doing crazy moves you’re more likely to find in the movies than on the street as humans, but then Okada will cut to the cats being shown as cats in the next panel, still doing these weird moves! Since these cats are little thugs, fights happened a lot and honestly this story feels like it’s more for fans of stories about punks than it is for fans of cats.
Continuing with the art, there are also some, “unfortunate” character designs later on. While Ryuusei and the rest of the main gang look like typical (Japanese), manga yankis, a number of the cats in the other gangs have black coloring which leads to them all being drawn in identical dreads and just looking like some bad stereotypes. The next volume seems set to introduce some new characters, including a fluffy cat called Mr. Moke who is constantly smoking and whose human appearance also looks like a black stereotype. Honestly none of the character designs are really “inspired” but the majority of them are at least “bland” rather than “questionable.”
In the end, it feels like a fun idea that went on far too long, like it should’ve been one volume or heck maybe even a true, one chapter one-shot. The basic plot — Ryuusei is looking for another cat from his past — isn’t a bad premise but it plays out boringly. Little of note happens from chapter to chapter and it feels like Okada is seeing how many chapters they can get out of this story before being told to wrap it up. The story drags and in the end this is probably more of a story for fans of yankees than for fans of nyas.