Blade Bunny

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Broken1.png Someone (either the creator or the hosting service) pulled the plug on this webcomic. The links in this review are dead. If you want to see more of this webcomic for some insane reason, the Wayback Machine is your best bet. And even that's a long shot. Broken2.png
Theatre-Masks-Happy-And-Sad-Laugh-And-Cry.jpg
This author responded to a review on the site and his/her reply can be found here in the "Reactions" section.
Original review author: oddguy
Webcomic name: Blade Bunny
Author: Eric Kimball aka Drowemos Eseotevahi
Start Date: April 4th, 2010
End Date: November 5th, 2015
Genre: Ninja action… stuff. Ninjaction?
Defining Flaw: Terrible writing. Oh, this terrible, terrible writing.



Rating Summary

Art: Wiki.pngWiki.pngWiki.pngWiki.png

Not bad. But then again, he hired someone else to do that and the part of the art that he should be in charge of (the pacing and "directing" or whatever you want to call it) he failed at miserably.

Storyline: Wiki.pngWiki.png

Ugh.

Characters: Wiki.png

The awfulness of the main character overshadows everyone and everything else in this comic.

Miscellaneous Details: Wiki.png

Kimball seems like an ass (and probably smells like one).

Overall: Wiki.pngWiki.png

I'm giving it one extra point for the art not being shit.



Background

A strange set of coincidences lead me to writing this review.

As some of you may know, a few years back our site was "hacked" (not really) and a few of the reviews on it were lost. Every now and again we would remember we used to have a review about some comic and I would dig it up on "Web Archive". One of those reviews was this one. I remember when I first joined the site I read this comic, thought it was atrocious and intended to write a review. However, someone had already started one and when it was lost I had already long forgotten about it. A couple of months ago it finally occurred to me to go through the page list of the archived version of our old site and find all the missing reviews. And so, I dug this thing up again.

Right around the same time that this was going on, I popped over to our old forum to check if there had been any idiots posting on our abandoned old site (this still happens from time to time). I found a message by someone called "Drowemos" who identified himself as the creator of Exiern and wanted to talk about our old review of the comic. However, the post was made over a month ago and didn't contain a means to contact him.

I soon began trying to look him up and, lo and behold, I came across this comic, which I was just considering writing a review about, and realized they were both made by the same person. Me and Kimball exchanged emails, I told him I was unsatisfied with his explanation about why his previous comic was so bad and he has yet to respond.

So, after putting all that effort into finding him and digging up a bunch of stuff in the process, I figured it would be a waste not to finish this article.

Plot and Writing review

The story starts with "Bunny" being invited to the home of a Japanese feudal lord so he can hire her to assassinate his rival. She gets his name wrong, kills one of his guards for no reason (because she's so wacky and badass!) and that's about as far as I got before I lost focus because the main character is so annoying that this comic is a chore to read.

In all seriousness, I'm just going to give a brief rundown of the plot and move on to the writing because I hardly paid any attention to it after a few chapters. So here it goes:
He hires her to kill the other lord, she kills him with chopsticks and is then confronted by a ninja, fights him and realizes he's a robot, kills the robot, is hired by some dragon god to retrieve some holy artifact, meets some kid who's secretly a god or something, meet another robot who later becomes their friend somehow, some other boring stuff happens, she gets betrayed by the dragon who hired her and about here I couldn't stand it any longer and have lost the will to even pretend to pay attention to this comic.

All of this "fascinating" plot is seasoned by Bunny's retarded dialog. That's the main problem of the comic. The lead character is insufferable. Every line out of her mouth is this pathetic, trying-too-hard, "oh my gawd I'm so wacky cheese cake and monkey butts please love me" sort of shit that sounds like it's coming from the mouth of a 14 year old who's desperate for attention.

None of it is funny. In fact, it is so unfunny that it's painful to read. In the Webcomic Overlook's review the experience of reading this comic is described in a way that makes it seem laborious, and I must admit that this is exactly how I felt.

Besides that, the comic (like many others) reeks of zero forethought. Did you notice me mentioning a robot back there? Did it strike you as odd? It struck me as something that was added to the comic at random because the author likes ninjas and robots but didn't lay down a plot before starting to draw and, like everything else in it, later had to be excused by having characters make cryptic comments about it to imply he didn't just pull it out of his ass and then finally make up some idiotic explanation for it years later.

This is also how Bunny's moronic behavior is explained. First by her stating at one point that she's only pretending to be stupid and that she "doesn't even know who she is anymore" in a hackneyed attempt to make us care about her, and much later (in a prologue added near the end of the comic) by explaining that one time kids were mean to her in school when she was 6 years old so she decided to act like an imbecile and never fucking stopped. Not that any of this helps because even after you know why she acts so annoying, SHE STILL ACTS REALLY ANNOYING!

I don't think I can explain in words how bad it is, so let me just pick one page from the comic at random so you can see what "Bunny" is like.


Bbunny.jpg


See? See how fucking forced this humor is? Every single line of dialog is like that and the story's secondary character "Kyoto" (why the fuck is she named after a city?) being the perfect contrast of that by talking like a cross between a stereotypical samurai obsessed with honor, a poorly written period piece about victorian england and a snarky 20-something with a "Questionable Content" level excuse for wit is just as bad.

Art

Every conversation they have in a nutshell:
Kyoto: Verily, let us go to Starbucks with honor.
Bunny: Yes durrrr I'm retarded.

The art is good. Seriously, it's actually good. I'm not the type to shit on manga style art just because it's manga. This stuff pretty professional looking. Excluding the first few pages of the comic that were sort of ugly, I have no complaints.

Buuuuuuuut it isn't Kimball's. He didn't draw it he just hired someone to do it for him. Plus, I still have a few major problems with the art that aren't its quality. Mostly I think it's schizophrenic. The art jumps at random from being an action scene in one panel to a somber tone the next and all the way to the other side of the spectrum with chibi shit in the panel after that. The jokes have no comedic timing (although I don't think having some would be enough to make them funny) and the fights feel less like a sequence of blows and more like a collection of disjointed kicks and punches. The "camera" jumps around constantly and I don't think anyone though of figuring out what their surroundings look like so every panel might as well be happening in a different place. It sort of makes me wonder if it's just poor planning or if it's due to Kimball trying to shove as much as he can into the least amount of space because he's paying for the art per-page.

So I don't really know who I should blame for this. Is it the artist's fault for not knowing how to pace and Kimball's for not directing him well enough? Or is it 100% Kimball's fault and the artist is just following his instructions to the letter?

Personally, I blame Kimball. After reading this comic I am just about ready to blame Kimball for everything including war, poverty and my cat dying if I can just photoshop a picture of Kimball standing over it.

Author biography

I was going to look up the author's picture but this is the first thing that came up when I googled "Eric Kimball" and it was just more funny

Last time we reviewed a comic by Drowemos the bio only focused on the fact he has to gall to try and charge people for reading it, or at least for seeing the naughty bits. This time I did some research that was a bit more intense and can tell you that money is a connecting string in everything he does.

Plowing through some of his old blogs I could hardly find one post that wasn't directly or indirectly about how much money his comic is or isn't making. But that's not even the best part. The best part is that in one of his many stupid slapfights he got mad at Zuda comics for offering money to other artists but not him. Yes, he actually though he deserves to get paid for the turd that was Exiern. He responded to this by throwing a tantrum and "trolling" their forum. Or at least what he thought was trolling (or what he chose to call trolling to look less pathetic) and was actually just a lot of bitching and whining.

I'm sure you've noticed I said "many slapfight" and would like to know who else. He got into a fight with Wowio about a contract he tried to sign with them but didn't do it on time, with Keenspot about how they run their site and with Halfpixel over god knows what. He complained about the review he got from John Solomon, however not to Solomon himself but rather to "The Webcomic Overlook" in a stupid email because El Santo said Solomon was right. He also complained to us recently in a whiny email and is for some reason mad at Scott Kurtz of PvP (but didn't have the balls to confront the fatass at a convention they both attended).

These are just the ones I was able to find in his old blogs and by digging around a bit. I'm sure that there are plenty of others since he hasn't updated those blogs since 09 and I didn't feel like reading his various comments on other sites. What I can say about these slapfights is that all of them are one sided and are characterized by Kimball pointlessly whining without anyone caring or, in Scott's case, by him showing up wherever he is mentioned to give his unsolicited opinion about him. He whines about trolls, he whines about "Electric Tiger" (that comic from the creator of Right Left Center), he whines about his comics being labeled "Bad webcomics", he whines about him trolling his own forum and about not making enough money and about having dyslexia, for which he deemed it appropriate to have an entire section on his site despite people like me who have dyslexia deal with it by running our work through a spell checker before officially publishing anything. He whines, whines, whines. Speaking of spelling, note Kimball's editorial prowess, successfully changing "assonate" to "assassinate", but at the same time ignoring a missing "the" and the weird composition of the second sentence (he finally fixed that). This is exactly what I've come to expect from someone with the intellectually stimulating humor based on words like cunny and titmouse.

And you know what else? He's delusional. He decided one day to try publishing his work professionally. Unfortunately, having not done his homework, he sent 40 or so comic pages of his story to DC and Marvel, despite the fact that a) the standard of print comics are 22 pages (come on, that's elementary grade for a comic nerd) and b) the Big Two only accept written manuscripts as pitches. Whoops.

Finally, his art. I found some old comics of Mr. Kimball laying around. First, it was midway through Exiern that he realized he can't draw. That's when he deleted all of the old art and hired someone else to do it for him. But those aren't his only comics. He also has some kind of collection of short stories linked to the "Blade Bunny" site (I assume these are his), a comic where he is listed as someone who "assisted" from his past in the transgender fetishist community known as CMX910, and (more interestingly) this abomination full of ugly, sexual drawings of female monsters and ending in full frontal catgirl nudity.

What the fuck Kimball.

Conclusion

I think Eric Kimball actually believes he knows how to write. I think he used to try and draw his own comic, failed at it and hired artists to do it for him. I think he believes that his art may be shit, but if he can only get someone to do his drawing for him he can actually make a good comic.

Eric Kimball is wrong. His writing is an atrocity and Blade Bunny is an abomination. It is poorly planned out, poorly written and features the most obnoxious character in the history of webcomics. "Bunny" is the personification of "LOL I'M SO RANDOM XD" humor that has not ever been, nor will ever be funny.

Since, at the time of writing, the most recent chapter that just started is titled "Epilogue", I can only hope this is the end (and god wiling not the start of something worse). As it stands, Blade Bunny is nothing more than a waste of good art.

Other comics by this person reviewed on this site

Links