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.

6 comments:

  1. Anonymous21/8/11 09:21

    THANK YOU! :D

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  2. Anonymous22/8/11 00:01

    Did you read Biomega from the same author? I enjoyed Blame! a lot but Biomega was a big disappointment. What do you think

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  3. I've read and enjoyed most of it. It has a different mood when compared to Blame!, it's more conventional. But yeah, some parts of it were not that good.

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  4. Anonymous23/8/11 03:03

    FUCK YES!!!

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  5. Anonymous25/8/11 12:34

    Thanx)))

    ReplyDelete