I haven’t been warning of or trying to avoid spoilers much in writing about this series, because well, I don’t expect any of you will actually read them like I did. This one was almost as boring as the last, but it had one strange moment and a lot of hinted at revelations in what cats shouted at each other in the middle of their fights. In the opening pages, Mocchi the housecat is the only who evaded being locked in the warehouse. He confronts the duo that orchestrated that trap- Madara the brindle and this other tuxedo cat. Protests the cruelty and senselessness of their actions. Madara casually opens the bay door again to find all the cat gang members injured and collapsed on the floor. Ryuusei is barely alive but he rouses himself to fight Madara, stopping him from killing Mocchi. The entire rest of the book is one long fight between Madara and Ryuusei. With some interspersed pages of backstory (again) as Madara explains why Ryuusei has been searching for Gekka, the tom calico. It still didn’t make much sense, but I’m guessing that will be cleared up in the final volume. The weirdest thing about this one, is the scene where Madara reveals his trick to overcome Ryuusei (who is the unbeaten fighter after all). It’s an array of moving cat toys laid out across the floor- so they battle in the middle of that, which distracts Ryuusei, and every time he looks at a toy, that’s when Madara strikes. Really odd. I suppose this was intended to be the funny part, but I just found it baffling. So Ryuusei has to corral his instincts and take control in order to beat his opponent, which is difficult. More very strange cat poses as they leap around during the fight. I did find myself admiring how the artist drew the action, all the lines for blurred motion, I haven’t seen a style like that before. The back pages have some character sketches of the three “exotic” characters (the longhair catnip dude, Bengal fighter and the hairless sphinx).

Borrowed from the public library.

More about Taiga’s brother, who picks a fight with Ryuusei. The brothers squabble and then just sit there- purring at each other, so it looks like they settled their differences! It was funny, how the others watching reacted. We find out who’s behind the three strangers coming to town, each of which goaded a member to meeting them at the warehouse in the other gang’s territory (with the big calico leader). They all show up at the same time- and just as things are getting dicey, with arguments flying everywhere and the instigation of fights- it turns even worse, as an improbable number of cats show up from nearby towns. All of this stirred up by the mottled brindle cat Madara, who was a go-between and informant among the gangs. He locks the warehouse doors- leaving them to all battle it out. He obviously wants some of them dead, but it’s unclear what his motivation was. Is there someone else behind all this… ? I don’t have much to say about this volume because honestly, it was kind of boring with so much fighting going on. More chuckles and eyerolling over the strange poses the cats get into.

Borrowed from the public library.

Still not the greatest, but it has me laughing, and shaking my head at the improbable poses the cats take when leaping around in fights or dancing. So in this volume, the three strangers to our cat gang’s territory continue to beat up individuals, especially the Bengal who is a fierce fighter. We learn (alongside a surprised Ryuusei) that the gang actually has four females- he just never met the other three because they’re in another area, raising kittens. Telling the young ones scary stories about the sphinx to threaten them into good behavior. Taiga fights the Bengal in a field, where there’s a little side bit about an old man who sits nearby and observes the feral cats- has been doing so for decades. Ryuusei and many of the others succumb to the big fluffy dude’s catnip fumes (they call him Smokey). The young exotic housecat Mocchi is the only one unaffected. So even though timid and unnerved, he takes on Smokey, using his smarts instead of muscle to win. Raiga has another confrontation- with his brother, who shows up and immediately they pitch into an argument. Now there’s more backstory about why the younger brother was once outed from the gang. Has he returned to cause more trouble . . .  or to help?

Borrowed from the public library.

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.

Meh. Somewhat funny, some cringe-worthy, just okay. Why did I read the whole thing? Not sure. It goes pretty quick in one sitting, because most pages are fight scenes, which bore me.

Tale of stray cats in a city, that are depicted as street gangs. When there’s no people around, they’re shown as humans. Kind of odd. You can easily tell which person is supposed to be which cat, though. I did appreciate that this seems to be showing how rough and unpleasant a stray cat’s life actually is- they’re mostly facing off with other males to defend territory and control who has access to females and food. In this story, the main cat gang has one female “molly” they protect, run by an orange tabby guy called Taiga. A young tough (brown tabby) named Ryuusei shows up, looking for a scarred male calico. Ends up fighting the gang leader, chastised for not knowing the rules of the turf (he doesn’t want to have to follow any rules, that’s why living “free” on the streets). Impresses the female (though she won’t admit it) when he beats Taiga, but then he runs off, not wanting to take over the leadership role- which is the usual protocol. When a rival gang takes the female Mii captive, they all go together to confront them, but it’s pretty funny how the other cats ditch them along the way- a few get scared off by a dog, three stop to paw at a lizard, another trio are distracted by a shopkeeper offering scraps, etc. until only Ryuusei and Taiga are on the edge of the territory to face their enemies. Also funny how they’d be deeply involved in these tense faceoffs with rivals, when ordinary people will show up “awww, kitties, how cute!” to these battle-scarred toms that are engaged in matters of life and death- from their view. By the end of the book, the two main characters have joined forces, Ryuusei seems to have found who he was looking for (the rival gang’s new leader is a large scarred calico) and I was eyeing the rest of the stack wondering if I wanted to continue. Mild curiosity where the story’s going, even though I don’t care for all the fighting and gratuitous rear ends (of the male cats, and the female Mii when she’s in human form).

The artwork is kind of odd, totally agree with some of the other reviews you can find on that. Sometimes the cats have humanlike poses that look strange, or their legs are in awkward positions. But when they’re shown as humans, they often take wild leaps that no human could accomplish, hold their hands like claws, etc. I don’t know why the main cat Ryuusei has that very well-defined star marking on his chest. I did think it pretty funny that in one scene he’s supposed to be fighting some of the rival gang members, who found him stuck in a cardboard box he’d squished himself into, to take a nap. Spent half the fight getting knocked around because he couldn’t get out of the box.

Borrowed from the public library.