Comic Bastards

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Worst of 2016: Shuriken and Pleats

By Dustin Cabeal

I don’t know if this was a reprint or it was collected for the first time this year, the dated ass artwork makes it hard to tell. The art was generic, and that’s being kind. The layouts were uninspired and lazy, the characters all look the same, just with different copy and paste “manga hair” attached to them.

The premise, well if you’ve ever read Aspen Comics’ Executive Assistant Iris series, it’s the same. I don’t know which came first, but I imagine it was this series. A girl that was previously a bodyguard for an older man wishes for her release upon his death. Now she gets to be a typical high school student in Japan… or not. The story shoots itself in the foot right away and then forces itself to create drama and a reason to go on. It has no need to continue and so for that reason I won’t continue reading it either.