Blade Kitten

Blade Kitten is a 2-D adventure game being developed by Krome Studios for Playstation Network. It is also a webcomic by “Space Captain” Steve Stamatiadis, creative Director for Krome Studios. It’s rare for any webcomic to be adapted into any other form of media, which does make this fairly significant in the world of webcomics. However, the comic was actually virtually unknown before the announcement of the game, and really, the dude’s already creative director for the company. Is it any surprise that an idea of his got turned into a game? Either way, the game itself actually looks pretty good, but what about the comic that spawned it?

I will tell you this: the comic reads an awful lot like a video game. By which I mean the plot itself is kind of bland and predictable, and largely seems to serve as a conveyance by which to present action sequences than any kind of interesting story. Here’s the gist of it: Kit Ballard (yes, “Kit”, don’t look at me, I didn’t write it) is a pink cat girl wearing a ridiculous costume who works as a “breaker”, which is just a roundabout way of saying “Bounty Hunter”. The comic starts with Kit catching up with a Bounty Head, resulting in a surprisingly difficult to follow fight sequence. In general the action scenes in the comic are pretty hectic, and not really in a good way. Characters have a tendency not to appear in the same panel together, making it difficult to judge scale or their position in relation to each other. Let’s take a look at one sequence in particular: we start with Kit facing her opponent, and dodging an attack by jumping straight up. Somehow, when she actually lands (and can apparently stick to the wall, which wasn’t a power she had displayed clearly before this point) she is several feet behind her opponent. She then drops seemingly straight down (though there isn’t enough context to say for certain). Whatever the case, you see a bolt of energy strike straight down on her opponent in the next page. Somehow, though, Kit herself, after the blow is struck, is seen landing several feet behind her opponent. All of the fight scenes in the comic are basically a mish-mash of nifty poses with no real effort put into maintaining a solid narrative.

Somewhere during the fight we meet Kit’s pet Skiffy, an aggressively toyetic creature known as a “Skiff”. It does… something to Kit’s opponent, which I guess leads to them giving up. Her opponent was already defeated, but Space Captain Steve just needed an excuse to introduce Skiffy. Like so many cute, marketable sidekicks, Skiffy is not actually important to the plot; it’s just another element that reminds you that the whole comic was conceived as a videogame first and just ended up with a story and webcomic because the author just felt like doing something with his idea before getting around to producing it as a videogame. The closest Skiffy gets to serving some kind of function in the comic is the fact that Kit occasionally talks to it as a means for the author to exposit on whatever is happening in the comic. I’ve always been down on pointless, cute mascot things, and this comic doesn’t do anything interesting enough with the concept to get me out of it. Kit just has a cute whatsit that she hangs out with because chipper anime girls are supposed to have cute whatsits to hang out with.

This brings me to the art. While not necessarily bad, it certainly… underwhelms. I think the biggest part of it is that the whole thing, like so much American manga, just looks like an American artist who arbitrarily straps manga clichés onto their art as a shortcut or because they know it’s more marketable. I have seen American artists who can draw in the style naturally, largely because that’s just how they learned to draw, but this doesn’t seem to be the case for this comic. The writing has a similar feel, where very few of the characters really have a “voice”, and it’s only through their clichés that we can distinguish them. As in, if you showed me two random pieces of dialogue from the comic, unless some kind of superficial cue appeared in their dialogue, I would have no guess on which character actually said anything. Though maybe I’m just down on the dialogue because I just hate when characters use internet shorthand in actual dialogue. For example, Kit literally says “OMG” in this page. As a reader, am I meant to assume she just pronounces that phonetically, or did she actually say “Oh My God”? It actually happens a few times, and you can call me a snob, but it just pisses me off every time. Not to mention occasionally grinding the flow of the page to a halt to explain some bullshit no one actually cares about, or just the occasional painful wall of text (which wouldn’t be necessary if the fights weren’t stretched out needlessly) and you just have a recipe for a comic that I don’t want to read.

I wouldn’t say that Blade Kitten is a bad comic. The writing isn’t likely to impress anyone, but aside from the points I mentioned it’s a fairly interesting, if predictable tale. Kit’s character design is goofy, but if you’ve watched anime or played videogames in the past decade, it’s a familiar kind of goofy. The whole comic takes place in that odd, generic future where technology has basically evolved into “magic”, and yet melee weapons are still on par, if not superior to, projectiles. No real justification is given, or even really needed: swords are just cooler, therefore, they work better. It’s been like that since the days of Zorro. It’s all familiar, but in a way that doesn’t give you anything new. Sort of like a pepperoni pizza: you may enjoy it at the time, but you’ll hardly remember it the next day.