I admit, this whole Nick Simmons thing has left me somewhat surprised. This isn’t so much about the blatant imitation of Bleach art, as that kind of thing probably goes on far more in comics than any of us realise (if, admittedly, using photographs rather than other comics). It’s not even so much as being surprised that Nick Simmons is writing comics – when your pop’s spent a good deal of his life masquerading as a cartoon character, that’s got to have an effect on you.

I do have to admit I am, however, somewhat surprised that anyone has actually read Incarnate. It’s not like this is a situation like Gerard Way writing Umbrella Academy – Gerard actually had is own fanbase from My Chemical Romance from prior to starting that series, not to mention that particular book having a reputation as being good. On the other hand, it’s kind of telling that most of the Incarnate news stories tend to lead off by referring to Nick Simmons as being Gene Simmons son. I suppose that has to be worth something, but as an original comic by an unproven author from a small publisher, I’d be surprised if it’d shifted 10,000 copies.

Then there’s the fact that part of this audience overlaps not just with people who read Bleach, but with people who read Bleach scanlations. That audience doesn’t particularly strike me as the kind who’d have been really into US comics, less-so indie ones, and doubly less-so anything that has been passing itself off as “American Manga”.

Which I guess is why I’m really surprised – I’m kind of shocked that anyone actually noticed this. That anyone has read both seems surprising enough in itself. That someone amongst the few who had were into Bleach enough to be able twig onto the similarity between the two is on another level of astonishment. It may seem like an odd comment coming from someone who wrote a post about Halo Legends having a shot from PreCure in it, but there’s a distinct difference a shot that was not only repeated in the OP sequence of every episode, but also reprised the for OP of the sequel, and some panels of a manga that, at this point, spans tens of thousands of pages. It maybe speaks volumes about the way in which I read manga, but, honestly, panel art just doesn’t tend to stick clearly enough in my mind that I’d be able to pick up on something like this. It boggles my mind that so many comparisons between Incarnate and Bleach surfaced so quickly.

As for Bleach, the series kind of lost me part-way through the crews first venture into the Soul Society. That the extended plot-arc robbed the series of a lot of what made the earlier chapters charming probably had something to do with it, as did the shonen power creep, but mostly I just think it was the spectacular job it made of dramatically increasing the size of the cast without giving me a reason to give a damn about any of them. I suspect that reading the series at the pace that it was being published in the US rather than Japan didn’t really help – reading it in batches spaced out by months rather than on a weekly basis doesn’t really do much for your ability to remember who anyone actually is, particularly when your cast is so large. I finished out the plot-arc, but honestly, I’ve had absolutely no desire to go back to the series since.