Review: BLAME!

It's a little late - I'm going to blame this on a holiday meant for rest from labor, but I want to save this last spot for an incredible old-school work like this.

BLAME! (Buramu!), by Tsutomu Nihei.  First published in 1998 and first published in 2005.

PLOT:

Killy is a lone man wandering endless levels of destruction, the remnants of some unknown superstructure.  There are rumors of survivors in the levels above, but from where Killy stands all he can see are mutants, killer robots, and a few scattered groups of humans struggling to survive.  All of these parties may be part of a larger conflict with a body known as The Authority, but Killy isn't interested in that.  All he knows is that he needs to find the Net Terminal genes - those from a time before the mutations started - and that he must continue to climb upward if he is to survive.



STORY:

Blame! is a fascinating story because so much of it is silent.  Pages go on and on without a single word of dialogue, and what dialogue is present tends to be sparse and cryptic.  The reader is given tidbits of information about Killy's world but never any clear-cut answers.  What's truly marvelous is that how well Nihei is make that mysteriousness work.  Those tidbits of info strike the fine balance between tantalizing and mysterious, and there's always enough exploration going on in those long, quiet stretches that they never grow dull.  Everything helps to support the mood that Nihei creates through his art.  This may be a world in decay, but as a narrative everything is in balance.

Everything about the world of Blame! is a mystery: the time, the place, Killy himself, the cause of the mutations, The Authority.  There's a general sense of oppression and futuristic tech in various stages of functionality, and we get small glimpses of its history through the conversations Killy has with human and machine alike.  Nihei has always been a writer who trusts his reader to pick up on context clues and put things together for themselves, and that's an approach that far more manageable than the loredumps that are more common in modern sci-fi manga.  It's also a smart one, because it puts the reader in Killy's place: always wanting to learn more and always willing to move forward to do so.

ART:

Nihei's art is many things: gritty, strange, dark and evocative.  It's a major credit to Nihei's art (and his background as an architect) that so much of Blame! is told visually.  The backgrounds are exquisite, enormous landscapes of sterile, industrial architecture decaying into tangled, shadowy ruins of wire and scrap.  His panels emphasize the vast scale of the structure around Killy, making him feel small and insignificant.  Even the sound effects play a role in the visual storytelling; the title comes from Killy's first action, the BLAM(E)! of a gunshot.

The character designs are just as unique now in manga art as they were at the time of its release.  His style is gangly and scratchy, with flat faces, wide-set eyes, and limp, scraggly hair.  They are as equally haunted and gaunt as the mutants and cyborgs around them, marked only by their abnormally long limbs and Giger-influenced fusions of flesh and machine. 

RATING:

Blame! is a masterful combination of haunting art and carefuly, largely environmental storytelling.  Over two decades later, it remains a absolute masterpiece of sci-fi manga and it is essential reading.

This series is published by Vertical, and formerly by Tokyopop.  This series is complete in Japan with 10 volumes available.  All 10 volumes have been published: the single volumes from Tokyopop are out of print, and the 2-in-1 omnibuses from Vertical are currently in print.