Bladekitten

Kit Ballard is your average cat girl. Pink hair, skin-tight purple leather outfit, electric sword, oh and of course, a pink tail. And she does the sort of work cat girls do, namely chasing criminals in mecha suits around from planet to planet as a 'breaker', or bounty hunter. She has a pet called Skiffy, who resembles an inflatable Pokemon, and that's about as far as I got, but it tells you enough.

This is manga, of course, but of the Australian variety, produced by an independent software studio called Krome, which has been behind Transformers and Star Wars games and has a string of other successes to its name including Australia's most successful video game.

The site has an online comic, and a video game has been launched recently for the PC and console platforms and captured some high praise already. There's a forum and a blog and a store, too. This is fairly small-scale stuff at the moment, though no doubt they are hoping the game will attract a lot more interest. Australia isn't generally the first place you think of when looking for manga, so it's a cult thing right now.

The online comic is well presented and I liked the option to see who the characters are, on each page, if you're new to the stories. But it does need a good DSL connection at the least, as it's very graphics-intensive and each page of the comic is a single JPG of around 300k and upwards.

The heroine is a twenty-something with a sense of humor that's slightly suggestive, making this a teen comic rather than a kids one, though frankly I can't see anyone being disturbed by their kids reading it. They're either too young to get the message, or they're old enough to pick it up, in which case they might as well carry on reading it. And it's very mild; a huge mecha with horns gets referred to as "Mr Horny" with the odd reference to the size of his sword. There are other characters of both sexes and of a similar age, so there may be the odd hint that they're doing something other than bounty hunting when they're off the page. But that's as risque as it gets. I think it's harmless fun, and I wish them luck with the video game.

[Edit - apparently my review is not "family friendly" and has been censored off the front page and the mainstream list of recent reviews. Third one this month, too. I apologize to any readers shocked and distressed by the adult nature of this review.
Oh, and it also has a tag inserted which I didn't put there, and it's a meaningless word, too, according to Google. Beats me.]