天下制覇

“You have obtained… Skull Barrier!” I wish…

If you were expecting this to be a dark, and brooding series about some vigilante in a skull mask beating up mutants, you might want to keep walking. The titular character appears for longer in the OP than he does in the rest of the episode, and the whole presentation seems a bit off to me because my understanding of the source is that Skullman is the main character and is off fighting some evil syndicate or the like. Instead, we get 18 minutes of introduction to the general world through the eyes of Joe Everyman, Hayato, before he has a brief run-in with Mr Skull himself as the episode ends. 

Anyway, it’s Bones, so the artwork is pretty uniformly excellent. The animation is also done very well, but for a series about a mutant vigilante fighting other mutants, there was even less action in the episode than there was action in Bones’ thriller, Darker Than Black. There just seems to be an all around disconnect with this series as it bounces from gestapo society, to nudity jokes, to dystopian sci fi, to half naked old men.

Maybe in an episode or two, this will make sense, but as far as first episodes go, this failed to excite me about the prospect of more. It’s probably because instead of getting the story from the view of Peter Parker, reporter and superhero, for at least this episode, we got to see things from the eyes of pre-Venom Eddie Brock and ragamuffin Jimmy Olsen. Not that Kiriko and Hayato aren’t relatively charismatic characters… they just aren’t particularly interesting charcters. In a world of mutants and syndicates and craziness, who wants to follow a clueless reporter and his Newsie waif?

Or perhaps the deluge of Spiderman 3 commercials has rotted my brain.