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The version of Blade that makes his way into Marvel Anime: Blade is as distinctly unlike the version of the character you've probably conjured in your head based on the three New Line films. This isn't the cooler-than-cool professional badass that Wesley Snipes portrayed in the movies, nor is it the street-level monster hunter from the short-lived TV series. It's not even all that much aligned with the magic combatant and vampire slayer version that took hold around the time of Captain Britain and MI6.

No, Madhouse went another way, seemingly drawing inspiration from samurai films (as Blade '98 did), while also mining the far-flung elements of the character's fictional history (for instance, I'd forgotten that in the comics he was raised in a London brothel after his mother's death). So Madhouse gives us a Blade that walks and talks unlike any version we've seen before, but is still familiar.

And then he starts killing evil harpies and things go sideways (in a good way).

As with Marvel Anime X-Men and Iron Man, Blade is based--roughly, I'd imagine--on a story by Warren Ellis. It takes Blade to Japan and later on an extended tour of Southeast Asia to hunt down Deacon Frost, the vampire that fed on his mother and made the boy who would be Eric Brooks the half-vampire Blade. And that means using his trusty katana to slice through an endless army of vampire henchman who burst immediately into flames while picking up Frost's trail.
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