Unlike with western comics, which are generally a collaborative effort between (at the very least) a writer and an artist, Japanese manga is often written and drawn by the same person. When the duties are split, it creates an interesting balance between the sensibilities of the people involved — a straightforward plot could be elevated by interesting art, or a more experimental narrative could be grounded by art that is easier to follow, or both things could be wild, or both things could be simple (and then a colorist or a letterer could get in there and really go nuts).

When one person is responsible for (more or less) making the whole manga, there’s an opportunity to utilize a little more artistic expression. One creator can write the story the way they want to write it and also visualize it the way they want it visualized, which, it’s worth noting, is rare in most other forms of sequential storytelling.

Blame! (pronounced “blam,” apparently, like a gunshot) is written and illustrated by Tsutomu Nihei, and the early pages in particular are a good example of what you get with a solitary cook in the comic book kitchen. There’s very little dialogue in the book, at least in the beginning, with Blame! just dropping you into a bleak and mysterious cyberpunk universe that seems to solely consist of one, impossibly enormous mega-structure with no top or bottom called The City. It’s just endless dark corridors, with big wires and cables that go on forever and sheer metal cliffs that drop off into nothing.

The art is sort of expressionistic, establishing a lonely, haunting vibe instead of depicting a tangible reality, which fits with the creepy setting and the similarly creepy robot monster designs. It is, put simply, very cool and very spooky. As the story goes on, different factions of humans are introduced and the rules of this world are established (humans lost control of the machines that built The City, causing them to go wild and just keep building it bigger and bigger forever), but Blame! is still at its best when it doesn’t necessarily make sense and the visuals just force you along the ride.

There is a Blame! anime movie that was released on Netflix, but just looking at the trailer, it seems to lose a lot of the magic in the transition to animation. No longer the work of a singular creator, it’s easier to recognize now-familiar aesthetics from other cyberpunk stories that have been told since (like The Matrix), which makes it feel less unique. With the edges sanded down, it becomes too normal. Too familiar. Luckily, the manga is still available (at least on an unnamed corporate comic book app), and it’s still very weird and off-putting in a cool way.

If you didn’t see it on my Bluesky, this week I launched the innovative new Untitled Comic Book Newsletter Search Term Suggester. The unnamed corporate comic book app I use is terrible for discovering new things, so to help me find new, random-ish things to read, I’m asking YOU for suggestions. Go to the link below, type in a word, and maybe I’ll see what books come up when I search for that word. Fun!