Eerie cuties

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Rating Summary

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Background


If it's part of Pixie Trix Comics, it belongs here. 'Nuff said.

Downfall
As described above.

Story and Plot


The story does have an energetic beginning. A vampire girl, Layla, and her little sister Nina are after a human for his blood. Well, it's not quite as clear-cut as all that. In fact, Nina doesn't have the proper vampire spirit. As might be expected, this does not please the big sister. But Nina is by no means an ordinary girl; she in fact has a possessed doll named Blair as a toy. So what do vampires do when they aren't biting humans? Go to Charybdis Heights School, specifically meant for educating young monsters.

And what do monsters learn, anyway? Yes, largely the same subjects as in any other school, though the staff are not necessarily the type found in any other school.

The vampires themselves are rather different from the ones of legend. They actually procreate and grow into adulthood. Also, the vampires in this story eschew actually killing humans they bite. Nor evidently do humans who get bitten by vampires get turned into vampires themselves. (Quite unlike the vampires of Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles!) And even for this scenario, Nina is unusual for a vampire-having been born on Easter, she has to eat chocolate instead of blood.

But Charybdis Heights is not a school only for vampires. Other students include succubi, werewolves, ghosts, cat-people, etc. The staff are a mix of monsters and humans (the latter not necessarily normal ones).

So how is home life for Layla and Nina? One cannot help but be reminded of The Munsters television show, though that show wasn't quite so cutesy.

Layla, when Nina has nothing to do, sends her sister to watch fellow students at a track meet. Nina is surprised when the race takes an unexpected turn, and she gets involved, evidently unfamiliar with the concept of werewolves. Well, maybe not. But Nina definitely is starting to notice boys. Her doll Blair, on the other hand, is possessed by a male spirit and is noticing girls.

Well, nobody can argue that the school lacks diversity. And even a succubus girl can be afraid of snakes...though, as it turns out, not illegitimately. Basically, the story from then on consists of jokes involving various types of legendary monsters, some of which are quite clever.

So far, this hardly seems like a bad webcomic at all. Well, I had high hopes for Sandra and Woo, which qualified for a review here too. So what went wrong? Well, I suppose it could be traced to the introduction of Melissa Hellrune, who would eventually be expelled from Charybdis Heights School and become part of the Magick Chicks spin-off comic, also reviewed here.

Girls who wish to hang out with Melissa are expected to do this. Or maybe they were supposed to do this. Yeah, that was probably the intended mirror. In any case, trouble starts...and continues...but Nina has gotten the worst of it.

And now trouble is coming from a new source. Well, maybe not serious trouble. In the meantime, Melissa's prank comes back to haunt her and her cronies while Nina is still trapped in the mirror. How to get her out? By using Kade to lure the bad girl into the cursed mirror so that the true Nina can come back. And Layla rewards Kade for his having helped...though more richly than she intended.

But what is the story with Tiffany Winters, vampire huntress? She is still walking around...so has she been transformed into a vampire? She believes this at first...only to learn that the sword that had run her through couldn't have killed her. Worried for naught.

Meanwhile, Nina has turned her affections to Kade...and requires her former paramour to advertise the fact. Unfortunately Melissa also has eyes upon him, though not necessarily because of love, and in fact plot to deliberately break up him and Layla...utilizing a magic artifact in their plot. Except that someone else finds it and decides to perform their own mischief, resulting with this. Melissa and cronies realize they could get into trouble over this matter...and the comic's humor is getting to the "naughtier" stage. Suddenly the magical orb takes on a life of its own, and [http://www.eeriecuties.com/strips-ec/better_you_than_me. Melissa gets hers]...but a more serious crisis emerges, which is fortunately resolved.

Now Eerie Cuties enters its monochrome phase. Ace Wolfhart stops by at the party Nina's family is throwing, and...holy Ty-D-Bowl Man! Talk about toilet humor! And we find out that Melissa's dastardly plot was a success, in a way. Meanwhile, unlike the others, Ace had not reverted to being a male, so the other girls treat him as one of them. Which is not necessarily a good thing. Ace comes to realize what it is like for the other gender, and witnesses up close female antics...and more forbidden hi-jinks as well, which threaten to get carried away. Whoops, it's the law! And the law isn't lenient.

Well, thanks to what happened to Ace Wolfhart, Melissa and her cronies have been transferred to their own strip. So, with them out of the picture, what's next? Does Eerie Cuties revert to its old form and tone down the sexuality? Fat chance. We now have a story about Layla being mistaken for a lesbian (which she isn't), and also Ace dealing with having female parts. Besides that, there is Nina and Layla switching bodies via a magic vase. Fast forward to now...yes, more about boobies.

Art review
A rather appealing combination of manga and Archie comics style with nice, elaborate but not overdone backgrounds. The webcomic was originally done as a four-panel strip, but in 2010 the strip became black and white, and the panels now vary in size and number.

From a critical point of view, the comic begun its race in a very innocent style. Character design relied heavily on cutesy, making each mythological and horror element as friendly as possible. The color scheme was still playing the horror treatment to a tee, with darker color tones, and not too much illumination.



However, in the middle of the first chapter, the authors could not withhold their desire to reveal the comic's true image by performing a sudden entrance into puberty on one of the characters, the succubus (min you). While this may have been played for laughs, it's simply very unlikely due to the graphic nature of it. At least, during the run of said character in the series, she was shown wearing not so provocative clothing. This in part helped save a bit of shame to a character which possesses the clear design of hardcore fan service. Later on, as the comic progresses we are giving progressively numerous panty-shots and lingerie sequences of the characters, more commonly of the female cast. Let's remember they are mostly under-aged girls.



If you are a fan of werewolves, as the vicious beasts of instinct from European mythos, we are afraid to fail you here. Actually, we didn't do shit, so we don't give a flying fuck. Werewolves in this story have an incredibly tame and even cartoony so to speak. Indeed, this said, we have to insist how is the design of monsters really simplistic to make them adorable. Though this isn't bad in the least, it might disgust people whom is attracted to the classic portrayals of the monsters involved in the comic.

Writing review
Originally the webcomic was a rather silly sitcom-style story akin to The Munsters or Groovie Goolies, with only some risque humor preventing it from being family entertainment. Every type of mythical monster is presented, but none of them are menacing or malevolent. Even the vampires who bite humans don't kill them or turn their victims into vampires themselves. In fact, they make sure their victims recover. The monsters grow up and develop like humans, and have quirks such as how they develop when they hit puberty, or comical situations such as what happens when the werewolf makes his change. Harmless enough entertainment, really.

But then, Eerie Cuties began concentrating on gender issues and sexuality and booby jokes and teen angst, and lost focus on everything else.



An incident to be taken in account is the "lesbian make-out" event during the final days of the colored, four-panels edition of the comic. After Blair is given the power to turn every female into an air-headed bimbo, the authors make an scene where Nina and Brooke, both turned into bikini-wearing blonds, begin to make-out while Blair is watching delighted announcing whoever "wins" is then making out their older, still appealing, teacher. At some point around this, a group of fans, large enough to be taken seriously, expressed their complaints arguing that it was not very "well-seen" that two characters under mind-control acted in such a way. The authors then decided to switch the image to one of Brooke cheering Blair. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand there's where the last bits of decency kiss this comic goodbye!

Most stories will usually feature at one point the characters wearing arousing garments, panty-shots, kinky situations, and will show very little concern about the characters' other characteristic, to a degree it becomes odd to see the characters as the mythological creatures they are due to how little they act as such.

Author biography


(Written by MakarovJAC)

There's not too much to say about the authors that hasn't been said before. However, at the BWW forums it has been suspected that DaveZero1 is the main influence turning Ma3, EC, and MC into smut peddling. Giséle's recent works have turned into a catalog for pinups, and now, underaged porn. It's as of yet unclear how to verify who is responsible for this as the site has no description about DaveZero1's background. Until we find some info about him, it's unclear whether he is responsible for all this mess.

Giséle has some points in her favor for making Cool Cat Studios and Penny & Aggie, which are nice stories with some morals to them. After she teamed up with DaveZero1, smut4profit simply became the rule of the party. However, after a little chat with the fellas at the BWW we decided that Giséle might be as guilty as Dave is for letting sex become the trademark of her works. Besides, I've found at her forums she's no longer interested in Penny & Aggie but focusing her time at Ma3 which by itself doesn't speak well about her.

Conclusion
Unlike some other webcomics reviewed here which had a good potential but wasted it, Eerie Cuties actually had been a good webcomic at the beginning. It was a cutesy but clever sitcom-style strip, with jokes about monsters who aren't truly evil, though admittedly it was for a more adult audience. Who couldn't smile at a vampire girl who needs to eat chocolate instead of blood, or everybody having to go to monster school, or a werewolf scaring a cat-person up a tree, or a pirate ghost being a physical education teacher, or a lot of other humorous bits about the advantages and limitations of being certain types of mythical monsters? It was rather like Casper The Friendly Ghost for the older set.

So why spoil a successful formula? Perhaps the people involved felt that the audience for this webcomic were desiring more in the way of smuttiness, as MakarovJAC's profile of them suggests. Perhaps, since there was already some blue humor even at the beginning, the creators decided that more would be better. But just as too much spice overpowers the underlying flavor of a food, too much smuttiness has effectively swamped the rest of the comic's elements.

Links

 * Gisele Lagace's home page
 * Sticky Dilly Buns, also by Gisele Lagace
 * Magick Chicks, which Gisele Lagace had been involved with until Strip 102, when David Lumsdon took over.
 * Penny and Angie, David Lumsdon's now-discontinued webcomic.
 * Pixie Trix Comix BWW Official Warning: this area is heavily exposed to bad web comics radiation. Protective measures should be taken inmediately. Avoiding this zone might be plausible as well.