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Maybe it was just me, but as the story progressed through succeeding volumes I found myself having to reread and go back several times because it just got weirder and tracking the plot and characters just got more dense.
I’ll say right off the bat, BLAME! requires you to be a sci-fi fan in order to enjoy it to the fullest. The story doesn’t run quickly at all, and the artwork tends towards thin, sketchy lines expressing a cancer-ridden world and people. Regardless, this is a title worth picking up if your taste in manga extends towards the darkly apocalyptic.
The first volume introduces us to the city-world of The Authority, a digital god, the command program of the Netsphere. Humans communicated with The Authority through the use of Net Terminal Genes, directing the growth of the city and humanity prospered. Time passed, wars and disease occur. The netsphere becomes infected and the city begins to grow on its own at random, inadvertently destroying itself and the small pockets of humanity that still exist. It doesn’t help that any unauthorized user access with the Net activates a powerful defense program, one that The Authority can’t even shut down. Our dark hero, Killy searches the city for Net Terminal Genes, as only these genes allow legal access to The Authority, and thus to stop the city’s mad growth. Killy is your standard cyberpunk hero, silent yet intelligent, equipped with a lot of luck and a little gun with a graviton beam emitter.
In this volume, Killy gets a clue about the genes in Cluster Town, your standard cyberpunk corporate town, where the employee slaves have worked there for generations and the higher-up officials are clones with continuous backup memory. As he works his way through security in the building, Killy meets Cibo, the head scientist for the corporation, imprisoned in a decaying body. She offers to help Killy by making him invisible to security and leading him to the president, as well as searching the employee database for Net Terminal Genes, in exchange for him freeing her and putting her into a new body. Cibo also wants to use Killy’s gun to blow a hole in the roof of this layer of the city, so that she can leave Cluster Town. Not a problem for Killy, as the genes he’s searching for aren’t in Cluster Town. Together, they take out the president (a mammoth being extending into multiple floors of the office tower), then climb to the top of Cluster Town’s equivalent of the Tower of Babel, where Killy can shoot a hole through the metal.
Only naturally, things aren’t that easy. Killy and Cibo are attacked by the defense program, but then something strange occurs...The Authority speaks to Killy through one of the attackers. It explains that it cannot help him or contact Killy directly, as the Net Terminal Genes are lost. Until the genes are recovered, The Authority can do nothing. It has been looking for the genes as well, but since the city has grown beyond the abilities of The Authority, it cannot locate them. However, it is confident that somewhere in the city, there is someone with the right genes. Until then, the city will grow like a cancer until it’s too large for the support structures...and everyone goes boom. Thus Killy must succeed in his search, although The Authority can do nothing to protect him. Then the security creatures reform, and the pair finish their climb to the top of the tower. Killy fires his gun, and makes a hole, where the pair escapes the total collapse of the tower just in time.
Killy doesn’t have much in terms of characteristics to bind him to readers; he has as much depth as any character from an action video game, constantly running, asking the same questions over and over, and killing anything that gets in his way. Thus BLAME! reads quickly, like watching someone else playing a video game. The visuals are what make this manga interesting, as the creatures are straight out of the pages of the Mythos, with a twist of blank faces from Ergo Proxy. Nihei is often praised for his depiction of architecture, and this is a highlight of the series. Buildings are straight, towering over people, but often infected with veins and other defects. It just adds to the dark and tainted environment.
BLAME! feels like a sci-fi survival horror video game, turned into a book. In fact, my first thought on finishing this volume is that I’d love to play as Killy in this world, or watch my husband tapping the buttons on the controller. This is a weakness as well, as the story moves ahead in spurts (Action, cut scene, action, cut scene. Repeat.), and BLAME! doesn’t read well in single volume doses. For me, I didn’t like TOKYOPOP’s presentation of sound effects outside of the panel. The idea is for the panel’s artwork to remain unobstructed, but for me, it’s a distraction and forces me to stop and hunt for the sound effect. Once in a while, I don’t mind, but when you have multiple gun shots on each page, it becomes irritating.
Overall, BLAME! is a good pick for sci-fi and cyberpunk fans. It will give you a lot of inspiring visuals for your own creative works. However, you have to accept that this is a manga that flows like Resident Evil 4, except you don’t have to suddenly hit buttons to avoid boulders, and if you don’t pay attention to when there is dialogue or keep pounding the buttons, you will miss out on important story information. I’ll continue reading this series, but it is definitely not everyone’s cup of tea.
