Nick Simmons, Gene’s son, is the artist and writer of a comic called Incarnate. As the link above shows, the whole thing is a hilariously obvious trace of Bleach and several other manga. I’ve seen frames and obvious ripoffs of Hellsing, Deadman Wonderland, FMA, One Piece and even one hilarious instance of, I shit you not, Spinzaku. No, not just Suzaku, Suzaku doing the spinkick. It’s so goddamn bizarre.
The funniest part was Kubo’s reaction to this in his blog:
"Between last night and this morning, I’ve been getting a lot of messages from overseas fans along the lines of “There’s an American comic ripping off Bleach!”. I’m not that good at English, but I looked at the site and it seems it’s a comic by Nick Simmons, the son of Gene Simmons.
To be honest, I’m more bothered by the fact that Gene Simmon’s son is a comic artist than whether or not it’s a rip-off."
Yeah I read about that yesterday. Bleach is no masterpiece, but it doesn’t deserve to be ripped off that blatantly.
I head about all the other series it took art from, but I never saw examples. I’m particularly interested in seeing what was ripped off from One Piece. I can’t image that meshing well, since OP has such a distinct art style, the comic must look like a mess with all that mishmash.
Even more disturbing was the reports that he even ripped off the original work of someone on Deviant Art (someone who made an original fan picture of Grimmjow from Bleach), talk about shameless.
Agh, I should have saved them when I saw them, there were plenty of examples. Not all of there were traces, some where just plain ripoffs. The One Piece example is a guy drawn bleach-style, but is detail for detail a copypaste of Crocodile down to even the scar, but with Dragon’s face tattoo. Then there’s another scene that’s taken directly from Deadman Wonderland, and the… black-haired dude is shown in a suit at one point, looking exactly like young Walter from Hellsing, only his hair looked like a perfect copy of Alucard’s (It’s the cross between the “wavy and messy” and “shadowy mass spreading outwards” look, hard to describe, but it’s unmistakable when you see it). The Devianart Grimmjow image is actually in the link I posted, just scroll down a bit.
Also, somewhere around halfway down the page, there’s an image of Ichigo holding his chest. The hilarious part is that his speech bubble is covering his left arm, but in the guy’s trace the arm is visible. Result? He apparently can’t actually draw very well on his own, so the now-visible left arm looks GIGANTIC.
EDIT: I found a sample of Waltercard. Seriously, check out that hair.
When I heard ‘ripoff’ I thought the story would be the same or character designs would be similar. There are pictures that are literally the same! How can you expect to get away with that?
