I love Tsutomu Nihei for obvious reasons: his art, which mixes stylized designs and disgustingly intricate detail, is freaking amazing. Nihei is intersted in drawing exactly two things - awe-inspiring cyberpunk worlds and badass humanoid creatures in sleek trench-coat and leather variants. Oh, and explosions of blood. These things are exactly what you got from Nihei's long-running debut manga BLAME!, a masterpiece of sci-fi action with very little dialog and something getting blown up on almost every page that didn't feature a massive illustration of some crazy-looking structure. BLAME! is one of my favorite manga for these very reasons, though I admit that it has some little issues, the most prominent of which is how, gorgeous as Nihei's art is, it is sometimes troublesome telling just what the hell is going on in his complex panels. The other issue is simply that BLAME! has almost no plot whatsoever, though I'm totally fine with that if it means that every single page can kick so much ass.
Read the rest of this entry
Entry meta
