Eric Brooks, a half human, half vampire man who seeks revenge on a four-fanged vampire for killing his mother. He had taken up the job of being a vampire hunter, slaying the bloody beasts one after one.
First Impression:
The sole reason why I’m actually checking this out is because I’ve never read Marvel’s BLADE in my life, therefore I wouldn’t have a bias opinion right off the bat.
But even so, this is like… what the fuck. It gave us the background to explain the reason behind why Eric is vampire hunter while also learning at the same time he’s a hybrid vampire (half human, half vampire (yes I call them that to make my life easier)). And Eric Brooks is hunting a vampire who possesses four fangs, the one who had killed his mother.
There’s the plot right there, straight to the point, no damn suspense. However there’s one thing we do need to learn, why the hell does Deacon Frost want Eric’s blood sample? Well I wouldn’t be surprised if they spat it out within the next episode and declare it’s to make hybrid vampires so that they can roam in the daylight and NOMNOMNOM on mere human blood and all that batshit stuff. If that’s the case or close to it, there’s honestly no point in watching this. The action was okay, I felt it was a bit dull considering it looked like he had only poked them or whatever – especially Makoto, she’s wearing silver boots I think because whenever she kicked them, they went all “POOF”. That really takes away the action considering how ‘simple it looks’ to take them down. Moreover, this didn’t feel scary at all. I sat back, watched it, not a second did I raise my hands to cover my face, there was absolutely no sense of mood. And when Makoto’s father died… well… that didn’t bother me at all – well I don’t expect to for a character that had maybe up to five minutes or less of actual screentime in the entire episode.
The animation, I have to say looks significantly better compared to Ironman’s, Wolverine’s and Xmens (I never watched any of the three show except up to episode 3 for Ironman, I seen images however). However I am questioning about whether there have been changes to the effects when the vampires are killed. We see them get sliced or hit by silver blade, but we never actually seen a glimpse of blood during the fights. I’m under the impression that it’s there way of censoring the bloody hell and made it stick to getting stabbed > burst into flames > disintegrate and POOF gone. Although I’ll be honest about one thing I really hate, the lips- yes those, they are really annoying to look it because they stand out so much.
Overall it looks to me that BLADE is going to be far too dull for my taste. Plus you already know that it’s going to lose to its competition of the Summer lineup such as Blood C, another show that revolves around vampire hunters – AND ACTUALLY SPILLS BLOOD AND CREATES THE MOOD THE POINT I CAN’T EVEN WATCH IT BECAUSE I’M SCARED AS SHIT AND IT’S OKI WHO FILLS ME IN! *SHOT*
Possibility of Blogging: Not gonna happen.
Possibility of Watching: No thanks.
Silvia: My turn! I really hate this vampire revival we are going through, but Blade lies close to my heart. So let’s see what the man with the sword has in store for us in his first animated series.
Let me lay some groundwork for you before we get into my impressions of “Blade.” I have not read any of the comics of the series, and I haven’t seen any of Madhouse’s Marvel works either. I HAVE seen the first two Blade movies, and I absolutely LOVED the first movie and think it was incredibly well done. With that in mind, how I view this series will be a little different than someone who is not familiar with any of the Blade canon in any form. I did, however, do some research into the Blade comic canon after watching this episode to answer a few questions I had, so I will pull information from the comics continuity but don’t consider me a reliable source.
With all of that in mind, let me say that my overall impression of “Blade” from the first episode was positive. The animation is very well done and it’s a pleasing show to look at. They keep with canon ideas for the most part, but I was irritated in Blade’s narration at the beginning where he says he has “the power of the Daywalker.” From what I understand of Blade canon, it was his enemies who started calling him the Daywalker. I guess it’s not technically incorrect but I think the phrasing is awkward and to hear Blade using that word to describe himself is strange to me. Then again it could be just a cultural thing because the grammatical structure of Japanese is different from English and how things are said giving them different meanings.
I had to laugh when Eva mentioned there was no blood, sorry Eva! XD In the movies whenever the vampires were stabbed with silver in the heart they would disintegrate into gold glowy ashes and disappear. The anime doesn’t have then stabbed in the heart to disintegrate, just somewhere on their body. Eh… okay, I don’t like it but I can live with it. I’m a stickler for little details like this.
Then again, you can’t be too picky with the Blade universe since the overall canon is almost nonexistent. The movies create an entirely new universe for Blade, though pulling from the comics, and the comics suffer from the same issues that long-running comic series often suffer from, i.e. multiple writers, multiple visions of the same universe, rewrites, retcons, etc. So coming into the anime it might be best to just ignore everything you know about Blade previously and enjoy the anime for what it is.
It does look interesting, and will be fun to see how they proceed with the classic storylines in the Blade universe. The animation is great and the action scenes are well scripted. For an action series, what more could you ask for? Hopefully the story pulls through to be interesting, we’ll see. One last interesting thing to note: it seems that the story might follow the comics continuity more closely (although Blade was born in the late 19th century in the comics and his mom looked pretty modern in the flashback in this episode), but his characterizations seem to pull more from the movie continuity since he seems cold and distant. Perhaps it’s too early to tell on the characterization, but he seemed much more braggardly in the first run of comics.
I don’t know about Eva, but I’m certain I will keep following and blogging this series. This is how I like my vampires—evil assholes who need killed, not sparkly douchebags who go to high school and stalk teenage girls.
