The manga follows the adventures of Nick and Lever, two foreign men living in Japan.
Nick & Lever provides examples of:
- Always Late: A Running Gag is Nick being late for work. It comes to bite him in the ass in chapter 117 when he finally gets fired for good after being late to work too many times.
- Animesque: Inverted. The manga is visually heavily influenced by the art style of Western comics and takes several visual cues of Toon Physics that wouldn't look out of place in Looney Tunes.
- Back for the Finale: Rick and Sugar come back in chapter 134 to help Nick and Lever stop a train from falling on a broken bridge.
- Creator's Culture Carryover: Possibly played for laughs, but the eponymous Nick and Lever seem to be overly familiar with Japanese culture customs despite being fresh-off-the-boat Americans.
- Digging to China: Chapter 70 has Nick and Lever digging to Brazil from Japan as a way to get a free vacation.
- Evil Counterpart: Chapter 78 introduces Nick and Lever's evil counterparts Rick and Sugar. They look near identical to them except with different haircuts and leather jackets.
- Eye Pop: Weaponized by Nick in chapter 1, where he stops a criminal from running away by shooting one of his eyeballs.
- Ham and Deadpan Duo: Nick is a loud and flashy Large Ham, whereas Lever is more deadpan and subdued. Unlike most examples where the deadpan half of the duo is snarky and gloomy, Lever is just as cheerful and optimistic as Nick.
- Kindhearted Simpleton: There's barely a brain floating between the main duo, but they're all around sweethearts and always strive to do the right thing. Even Rick and Sugar finally unlock their Hidden Heart of Gold in the magazine's final chapter.
- Medium Awareness: Used frequently by the title characters as a way to solve their problems.
- Chapter 5 has Lever stressed over being late to work. Nick gives him a handy shortcut of his: To simply get there directly by jumping from one panel to another.
- In one chapter, Nick's able to stop a purse snatcher by having his pompadour trip up the thief's motorcycle in the panel above him.
- No Celebrities Were Harmed: A lot of the main characters are based off of various WWE and fighting personalities. For the main duo, Nick is strikingly similar to Dolph Ziggler, even down to his name (Dolph's real first name is Nicholas); while Lever is based on Rampage Jackson and his coworker on Mark Henry.
- Red Oni, Blue Oni: Nick is the more hot-blooded and wilder half of the duo; whereas Lever is generally more cold-headed and calmer.
- Surreal Humor: This manga lives and breaths in it, with the main duo getting themselves into utterly absurd situations.
- Theme Naming: Nick and Lever are both named after meat. Nick is virtually the same pronunciation as meat (niku) and Lever's name is phonetically similar to "Liver".
- They Killed Kenny Again: Nick and Lever often die at the end of the strips and get brought back to life by the next chapter without explication. It's such a Running Gag that the volume covers feature them as skeletons (Volume 2) and as ghosts (Volume 3).
