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Manga-A-Day 19 – BLAME! v3

.Pi — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 02:46:12 +0000

And here’s today’s installment of Killy and Cibo’s (not-so-)merry adventures through the nameless megastructure. They actually spend a fair bit of time among other people this time around, and in a neat reversal of the prior volume, where Killy was a midget amongst most of those he encountered, the two of them tower over the folks they find here. There’s also a greater interaction with the autonomous systems aiding and impeding their progress, laying out more information and more questions at a nice pace. The violence and scale of battle also keeps on increasing, but still finds itself dwarfed by the sheer mass of the megastructure. Then the thing ends on a wickedly gripping spot and I have no more BLAME! in my possession to read. Dammit.

Manga-A-Day 18 – BLAME! v2

.Pi — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 06:48:53 +0000

Continuing on in much the same fashion, we see Killy continue to explore the mysterious megastructure for people containing a particular gene, working his way through several environments, and running into more creative uses of the genetic manipulation/mutation that is running rampant throughout. Midway through, we get a pretty huge showdown, followed by some insight into just what it is he’s looking for, as well as picking up a companion, Cibo, in his lonesome travels, and it seems like she’s going to stick around for a while, amazing!

His exploration of the world, and all the varied structures, pinged off a bit of an ARIA vibe for me tonight, something about the way the environment itself is presented, as a character in and of itself. I know that’s certainly been done, and done well, in other places, but ARIA’s what’s popping into my head as I work my way through it, so there you go. A late detail about the megastructure really caught my fancy as well- the system responsible for maintaining the thing started expanding it at random, and has done so to the point that the Authority (something of a master control program) itself no longer knows how large it is. Yeah. I’m gonna need to get to work tracking down the other volumes.

Manga-A-Day 17 – BLAME! v1

.Pi — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 07:46:34 +0000

A dark, violent, and utterly alien cybernetic dystopia, where no one can remember what the ground or the sky are like and new horrors lurk around every corner. Exactly the sort of setting, storytelling, and characters I love, I really should have read this ages ago, and started to at one point, but then never kept up. Because I’m dumb. Tons of pages without a single speech bubble or sound effect as our protagonist makes his way through the enormous superstructure that is our setting, a construct literally thousands upon thousands of stories tall, searching for people with unmutated genes, while fighting off any threats that present themselves. Not a happy work by any means, lots of time spent alone, and even when he does meet up with someone not trying to kill him, they usually end up dead anyways from yet another mutant or cyborg. Really good stuff, and I’m going to be sad when I get through the three volumes I have, as I know I’ll be completely hooked by then.