3 out of 5

I appreciate that this is a hard story to write – it’s a very silly concept, and Hawkman has pretty skillfully juggled self-awareness of that silliness with characters we like and scenarios that manage to be exciting or tense – so I do think it’s smart how the manga has been divvied up into actual plot-moving stories and “another case” side stories: the latter adds to the sense of world-building while clearly calling them out as filler (of a type) so you’re not misled into reading it as anything other than a bottle story. This approach presumably helps Hawkman keep things fresh.

Of course, balance is also necessary: too much of the side stories and it starts to feel like you’re never getting back to the main tale. So now that we have “another case”s for 2 out of 6 chapters and now this whole other pseudo series – a Squid game riff, with turning-into-a-cat the threat instead of death – taking up 2 more of those 6 chapters, Kunagi and Kaoru’s journey to discover Kunagi’s past only has so much room to do anything per tankobon. Their stumbling across a very peculiar town is pretty intriguing, but it becomes somewhat slight with the sequencing as-is.

The two “case”s are great, though, as they usually are – Hawkman is able to just step into slices of the cat world, and drop some of the satire/storytelling juggling to do day-in-the-life snapshots that are very fascinating – but the Squid game thing is really just turning into a running gag of movie references. It’s not bad – it’s admittedly very readable, and is better than the last tankobon for not having to do all the setup – but its level of parody is much more base than the main chapters; beyond the low hanging fruit, until / unless this develops into something more, I’m not much sold on it.