Tsutomu Nihei - Blame! and so on

While we're on the subject of Tsutomu's art I think this would be the perfect time to provide you with his artbook of Blame! and some other things he did along the way.

The greatest thing that I love about this artbook is that most of the Blame! related artwork is colored. This gives a nice insight in how the author imagined all this and it definitely gives it a lot more organic feel. It's too bad none of the colored images made it into the manga aside from the front covers. There are also some different art styles here which seem much like oil paintings (or something like that, I'm not exactly an expert on art) and they are absolutely astonishing. I especially love this one:

Along with Blame!, as the title suggests, there's other art which aren't Blame! related. The first being his weird venture into American comics by doing art for Wolverine. I have no idea why he did that (on a side note he also did a short Halo comic for some reason) but I guess he likes those things although they never really impacted his original stories. Along with that you get some art from Noise and from a few of his other comics, sketches of characters and stuff like that. There's a short comic at the end but it's untranslated although you can still manage to understand some of it.

Great artbook, get this.

Download.

Tsutomu Nihei - Blame!

Recently I've reread this and I realized that I never shared this here. Blame! is probably the most famous cyberpunk manga among the internet community (my fair estimation) so this is for those few of you who haven't read it yet.
Blame! is set in the distant future where humanity is extinct (or so is believed) and all that's left are their creations that stroll through the massive mega-structure. The story follows a character called Killy who is, at the beginning, on a mission to reach the top level.

The story itself and the plot contains much more "showing" than "telling", there aren't much words in here which is a plus and minus at the same time. The good thing about it is that it immerses you in this bleak and desolate world because there's not really much to talk about when you're alone in the middle of nothing. On the bad side it makes the plot harder to follow. Sometimes you find yourself wondering what the hell is going on because when the characters do speak they say something completely different from what you thought was happening. Although this happens sometimes you can still catch up with the story as it goes on.

The high point of this book is its world. There's nothing quite like it and I found it more and more interesting as the story progressed on. Although the whole story is set in a huge megastructure there is a lot of diversity in various levels that we see throughout the tale. Each level seems to contain its own genetically deformed humanoids and creatures of all kinds. The completely bleak art style gives a great representation of how massive and broken down this whole thing is. Apparently Nihei finished the school for architects so he knows how buildings work and his knowledge really shines here. The only thing that bothered me sometimes here is that sometimes the shading is so dark that you can't really tell what's going on but that could be due to bad scanning (some volumes aren't really scanned top notch).

The atmosphere, the plot and the interesting characters make this one of the best manga made that I've read and it would be a shame if you skip this.

Part 1, 2 and 3.