Nyankees

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tl;dr: A manga with an interesting and amusing gimmick that collapses when it tries to be something more.

Nyankees is a really unique manga. The central concept is showing the life of stray cats, but with the cats portrayed as humans, more specifically portrayed as a gang of street thugs. The way this works is that each character has a human design and a cat design and the art swaps back and forth between the two. To be clear, the cats are just cats and are never actually human, and what’s shown with the cats as humans is simply a visual metaphor for the sake of ... making things interesting for the reader. And make things interesting it certainly does. It works incredibly well at showing the parallels between how stray cats behave and how street thugs behave, with claiming territory, gang wars, fighting over women, etc.

The back and forth is used incredibly well in a lot of different ways. There is of course a good amount of the standard two panels back-to-back, one with the characters portrayed as cats and the other with them portrayed as humans. But more interesting I felt were how it flowed with the two intermixed flipping from panel to panel. Going back and forth between the two styles in quick succession is really bizarre at first, but it’s certainly unique enough to be engrossing. Things like having a long string of panels where it’s in one style but suddenly switches to the other was also used well to carry impact. Having the characters portrayed as humans continue to act like acts was also really visually amusing. Having the characters portrayed as cats act like humans with things like dance sequences kind of breaks the concept, but was amusing enough to allow it a pass. The art itself is only decent, but the cats are drawn really well and the design work in having humans parallel to them is pretty solid, so overall the art works really well for the story it’s telling. So, there is definitely fun to be had in this manga.

Unfortunately, everything beyond the concept is lacking. The story starts off incredibly simple with the characters behaving like cats and having small problems at the level of cats. There isn’t a lot to it, but it carries the cat/human duality gimmick well and things are fun enough for a while. As the manga goes on, things start getting more serious, and the characters begin behaving more like humans with attempts at more complex relationships and plot lines. Things get incredibly dark by the final volume. When I started this manga, I never would have imagined I would end up reading about cannibalism forced out of desperation to survive, but that’s what I got.

This shift results in two major problems. The first is, the serious attempt at a story simply isn’t all that good, with it being incredibly forced with random pacing and the character’s being incredibly flat. The second is, it doesn’t work well with the gimmick. It’s really hard to take the plot all that seriously when it’s still pulling the cat/human gimmick and at the same time, making it serious makes the gimmick less amusing which significantly weakens what was previously the manga’s core strength. To be honest, I suppose the gimmick was wearing thin even before it started getting really serious and the attempt at forcing it into being a more serious manga was likely done by the author with that in mind. But in the end, it really didn’t work, and it probably would have been better to just have a shorter story planned out that would end before the gimmick stopped being interesting.

Ryuusei is a male dark tabby cat roaming from town to town searching for a male calico with scarred eye. After ending up in Nekonaki Town, he gets involved in various turf wars and other shenanigans with other cats.

For some reason, Gokushufudou kept popping up in my head while reading this. The two manga are similar when it comes to humor, in that a lot of the hilarity comes from the contrast between the "serious" art and the intensity of everyone's reactions in mundane situations. It's more toned down than Gokushufudou, with a few moments of more traditional gags (like the cats rushing to a ... fight but being distracted by food along the way) here and there. The violence is more explicit, in that you see punches happening and wounds appearing on whoever's fighting, but it never reaches gratuitous gory levels.

While Nyankees has less of the wholesome slice-of-life vibe of Gokushufudou, it makes up for it in the rapid-fire switching between the human and cat forms of the "nyankees". A situation will escalate with the characters in human form, where they're throwing punches and drawing blood, then cut to their cat selves in reality where they're actually lightly batting at each other with their paws, then cut back to human form where they're banged up as delinquents normally are after a fight. And the best part is that despite being no transitions (like screentones, text or in-between panels) between these "modes", the switch between forms is almost seamless.

The art style is straight up some of the best I've seen in a manga, especially when it comes to making the characters diverse and recognizable in both human and cat form, with certain details like coloring, body size, fur patterns, a torn ear etc. (e.g. one female cat's black spot under her nose translates to a mole in her human form). And, yes, the male cats have balls.

As for the characters: they're not really deep, but most of them are given one or two traits and the important ones get a short backstory on top of that. Not amazing or particularly memorable, just adequate for the purpose of the story; Ryuusei is endearing BECAUSE he's so simple minded, with others always assuming he's plotting something or has a plan, when he's actually either distracted or jumps before thinking.

So, in short, it's not a deep story, but it works for what it's trying to accomplish: a fun, bizarre reimagining of delinquents as cats.