Tsutomu Nihei emerged as one of the best manga authors to date with his 10 volume “Blame!”. The excellent cyberpunk story grips you from the first pages and never lets go. The graphics are quite breathtaking and Niheis study in architecture leaves a mark on the world of Blame!. Gigantic structures seems to stretch to infinity and space and time themselves are at enormous scales.

It’s hard to summarize the story without giving away spoilers. Killy, the main character of the novel, must save the City which has began to expand beyond the control of the Authority by finding someone who possesses the Net Terminal Gene. That person would than have the capacity to stop the chaotic growth. Along his journey he must face the Safeguards, creatures that are meant to deny any external access to the Authority by humans (such as the ones with Net Terminal Genes). The story is far more complex than this and hold many side stories that help create a dark and quite disturbing vision of the future.

As said, one of the strong points of Blame! is the scale of the world described. The Megastructure is the one that holds all life, and it’s a artificial structure of metal and cables created by the Builders. It is mentioned that even the Moon itself might have been at some point incorporated into the Megastructure and that it’s exact size cannot be determined. Nihei portrays the world with great architectural detail,  capturing perfectly the enormity of the places. Time itself has out of the ordinary proportions: Killy must take a elevator to one of the upper levels of the structure, and the time needed to reach the destination is somewhere in the hundreds of millions of hours.

Another dominant feature of Blame! is the violence. As it would be expected of a harsh world, living in Blame! is quite difficult. There are no ordinary weapons. Killy itself carries a Gravitational Beam Emitter that is able to fire at impressive ranges and destroy entire levels. The body in Blame! is just a vessel of organic material. Many battles leave the participants mutilated and maimed only to allow them to regenerate.

All in all, a superb manga, that has unique characters, a compelling story and exceptional graphics. The only thing one might find annoying is the lack of dialog, most of the time Nihei choosing to let the panels do the talking. This is by no means a drawback since having to pay more attention to the graphics you get more and more sucked into it. Last but not least, it must be mentioned that the overall creature design is influenced by the style of H.R. Giger, but with accents more on the mechanical part, rather then the biological aspect.

Nihei also started to work on a sequel for Blame! called NetSphere Engineer but to date only one chapter was published and there aren’t other scheduled. Some of the other great works Nihei has done include: NOiSE (prequel to Blame!), Biomega (dropped after 10 chapters, but well worth reading), Wolverine Snikt! (a superb spin-off which portraits Wolverine the way he should look in the comics) and a number of one-shots.

Hope this has convinced you to go and grab the 10 volumes at your local comic shop, because it’s certainly worth every peny.