My kid looked at the cover of one of these and said “that looks bad.” As in, awful. Yeah, kinda. I wouldn’t say I’m really enjoying them, and I skim over a lot of the fight scenes, but it started to grow on me a bit in this second volume.
There’s not quite as much fighting, for one, and some slightly more interesting plot points are introduced. Ryuusei finds out that the huge calico cat boss of the rival gang is actually a female– and he’s not the only one who’s shocked. There’s some backstory provided on her. He doesn’t want to but Ryuusei fights her in front of everybody else, and beats her, which earns him the respect of the rivals, so now the two gangs have a kind of truce. Then we get backstory on the calico that Ryuusei is actually looking for. The cat gang has a party (I’m guessing catnip is involved) where they all dance in freakishly odd poses (standing up like people, but in their cat form, with limbs doing things that aren’t physically possible) and they all collapse on the pavement afterwards. They encounter a young exotic shorthair tom, a lost housecat who is bewildered by all the aggression and scorn towards him (yeah, the stray cats despise housecats in this series too). Then run into a trio of strangers -separately- encroaching on their turf- a spotted male Bengal who trounces everyone without much effort. A creepy looking sphinx (depicted in human form as a lean bald dude covered in tattoos) that I thought was very well-depicted artistically- and he just stares at the other cats, who are so freaked out by his sinister appearance they don’t dare fight him. And a big fluffy male wafting fumes of catnip that makes everyone fall aside in a daze. Are these three working together? or is something else going on . . .
Borrowed from the public library.
