Creative Staff
Story/Art: Tsutomu Nihei
Translation/Adaptation: Melissa Tanaka
What They Say
In a future version of Earth, there is a city grown so chaotically massive that its inhabitants no longer recall what “land” is. Within this megastructure the silent, stoic Kyrii is on a mission to find the Net Terminal Gene—a genetic mutation that once allowed humans to access the cybernetic NetSphere. Armed with a powerful Graviton Beam Emitter, Kyrii fends off waves of attacks from fellow humans, cyborgs and silicon-based lifeforms. Along the way, he encounters a highly-skilled scientist whose body has deteriorated from a lengthy imprisonment who promises to help Kyrii find the Net Terminal Gene, once she settles a score for herself…
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
In the back of the first two volumes of the Master Edition of Blame!, published by Vertical Comics, is an overwritten blurb for another of their titles, Knights of Sidonia, a series also written by Blame!’s Tsutomu Nihei. Sidonia, it implores, “may be Tstutomu Nihei’s most accessible work to date.” A fine way to disengage from several hundred pages of what is considered his least accessible. (It was also his first, in 2007.) And they have a point, at least in the pursuit of selling more books. Blame!‘s reputation is due in large part to its minimal use of dialogue, zero authorial text, and stubborn refusal to offer much context to its dense and destabilizing drawings of an endless city, stair upon stair, settlement upon settlement, layer upon layer of metal and stone and human life. There is never firm ground for the reader to stand on because its main character, Kyrii, almost never stops moving, walking, climbing, fighting, investigating. And because there is no ground in the Megstructure.
But it does not mean that a story is also transient. Blame! is a sprawling, spectacular and often grim space, but it is a grand tale.
Its world is the Megastructure, an undefined, immeasurable, and, thanks to autonomous and ancient machines called Builders, ever growing city. There is no sense of a larger world beyond it, no window or access to the larger universe. It is in most parts empty of people or life of any kind. “Megastructure” is a term used only by those few characters who can grasp its impossible design, confined in literal strata of constructed spaces themselves difficult to measure and challenging to leave. Kyrii is a lone figure who in ceaseless wandering manages to traverse the mazes of stairs and bridges and honeycombed cities and massive voids, crossing from one stratum to another. Reading Blame! is this experience—not reading, often, in fact, but watching—as Kyrii, and occasional companions, navigate these places, or fall to unlit and long neglected chambers, or hang from a railing while in the far distance massive city-like structures suspend jagged and twinkling from an unseen ceiling, or climb a tower over a plain filled with canyons of cities receding to the horizon.
From claustrophobic access tunnels to unfathomable large spaces the shape of Kyrii’s world is never certain, and it can be as much an unnerving experience as a mesmerizing one to view it. This is the reputation of Blame!, these visuals.
Its story is a search fundamental to understanding this shape, and to regaining control over it. Kyrii is dispatched by a mysterious group to find a certain kind of human (we encounter him in the beginning of the story at the end of another of these missions), a person or persons now almost mythical. They are descended, perhaps, from the original residents and designers of this world, marked by a “net terminal gene,” an ability to cybernetically access the information network that still pulses through and connects, and controls, the Megastructure. The NetSphere, however, is inaccessible to humans without the gene, and has been for ages as the ability vanished from the descendants of those first peoples. The danger to all of this, what gives Blame! its additional reputation for violent action, occasional gore, and enormous explosions, is that the NetSphere was built with safeguards that are designed to prevent humans without the net terminal gene from accessing it, and, it seems, from existing in the Megastructure at all. These are literal Safeguards, gothic, inorganic, chimeric beings who manifest in certain areas to kill humans, destroy their settlements, and just get in Kyrii’s way.
Volumes one and two of Blame! Master Edition expose much of this, but there are other secrets, and more questions are raised along the way, including, naturally, about Kyrii himself. Some of the groups of humans he encounters are not dissimilar to hunter-gatherer tribes, living in ancient ruins, but some strata feature people who are not only residents of vast corporate-run cities but also physically larger. In the latter, near the end of the first volume, Kyrii encounters his most important partner throughout the series, Chief Scientist Cibo, a brilliant woman whom he first meets as little more than a desiccated corpse, her brain kept alive as she rots away in the bowels of her city, punished for, more or less, challenging her boss. (The cover of volume two indicates she does not stay that way.) Until Cibo we are much in the dark about “net terminal genes” and Safeguards and the Administration (artificial entities in the NetSphere who are polar opposites to the Safeguards, seeking to help humans regain control). Before meeting Kyrii, Cibo and her team had been attempting to access the NetSphere with artificial net terminal genes, as well as attempting to break out of the stratum they lived in, evoking the Safeguards’ wrath. She aids Kyrii in his quest, saving him and other companions several times.
Cibo is a blessing in many ways to the story, the brilliant, clever, analytical and quick-thinking scientist to counter the dark, brooding lone wolf persona of Kyrii. Because he says little beyond asking around for the net terminal gene, we need Cibo to in fact explain what it means, and to investigate it and Kyrii’s past. She arrives just in time in the story, after 350 pages of Man With No Name adventure and mystery. Not that we needed someone for Kyrii to talk to as he explores (they aren’t the type for small talk), but because she’s key in helping Kyrii advance the story by advancing him to places he could not achieve without her guidance. She helps complicate the story and does so by adding knowledge and wit.
There are episodic characters, guards of various settlements who provide aid, or others using Kyrii to exploit another group, each dispensing cryptic clues to their ancestors. And there are the Safeguards, many Kyrii blows away with his trademark little Graviton Beam Emitter gun (the BLAM! of Blame!), but some who pop up again and again, and whose interests involve Kyrii himself more than other humans.
The fascinating yet daunting thing about the story that the first two volumes encompass is that we are but a third of the way into it all, despite the great distances and unimaginable structures through which we’ve tracked Kyrii. There’s so much to take in, or that we had to pass taking in just to continue following him. Along with its reputation as an icon of cyberpunk literature Nihei’s work owes some credit to the science fiction of the 70s, of literal big ideas—Larry Niven’s Ringworld, or Phillip Jose Farmer’s World of Tiers and Riverworld—as giant experiments for grand human adventure and drama. The scale of the world can subsume the characters, but it also enlarges their potential, and the story’s possible directions, many-fold.
A decade on since I first read Blame!, in Tokyopop’s long out of print 10-volume edition, I find myself again with next to no idea where it can go from here, which is a wonderful lapse of memory. Rediscovery is also wonderful (I’d forgotten Cibo’s introduction, and when) and even if you’re more up to the minute with it than I am, reading it anew in the larger and newly adapted Master Edition is well worth the return journey to all of Kyrii’s ceaseless wandering.
A Note on Packaging: The selling point of the Blame! Master Edition series from Vertical Comics is that it is the English-localized version of the large (shiroku-ban, or B5-sized) special editions published in Japan, by Kodansha, in 2015. These books more or less double the page size of the previous editions from Tokyopop in the early aughts, an improvement long-sought on both sides of the Pacific. This does not bring out so much detail as it does add to the depth of Nihei’s world, detailed as it is by the inference of size in the far background of full-page drawings, or the density of mechanical systems in a cramped corridor. There’s now more to take in instead of more to see.
As well as including the select color pages—two-toned spreads of blue or red—offered in the Japanese publication, Vertical (partly owned by Kodansha) offers a new adaptation, as well, noticed only by readers of the previous editions in select character and place names. Most noticeable is that “Killy,” by the Tokyopop adaptation, is here Kyrii. Given the likely Greek roots of the name (and others in the story) it is an imperfect improvement—more what the name intends, but at risk of being mispronounced by English readers. (Almost the same either way in the Japanese, it’s closer to ‘key-ree’ in English; considering ‘Blame!’ is supposed to be read as ‘Blam!,’ it seems somehow not inappropriate.)
Of more curious note is the publishing history of Vertical’s first two volumes in the series. The first, printed in the United States, in at least its first edition and printing, improved on all facets of Tokyopop’s editions except in one thing I may have expected most with a $34.95 MSRP: paper quality. Print quality is fine and full, but spoiled as I may be from days of old, the familiar rough medium weight paper, common in the past fifteen years—its roughness always seeming to have stood for something, akin to newsprint, disposable—adds a physical texture to stark and fine-lined work like Nihei’s that can repel the eye. Or just feel rough on the fingers. Which is why volume two, printed in South Korea, was a delightful surprise: A heavier weight and smooth paper, a sort once common among similar large domestic editions of manga twenty years ago and sporadically since, has replaced all of that. (Though a dozen pages fewer than the first volume, it is very much heavier a book, to some delight.) The texture removed, the detailed lines of some massive structure far in the distance, or the lines of Cibo’s face up close, finally pop. There’s more to take in.
Content Grade: BLAM!!
Art Grade: BLAM!!
Packaging Grade: BLAM!
Text/Translation Grade: BLAM!
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Vertical Comics
Release Date: 9/13/2016 (Vol. 1); 12/13/2016 (Vol. 2)
MSRP: $34.95