The Cyberpunk World of Tsutomu Nihei

By Kai-Ming Cha -- Publishers Weekly, 6/27/2006

Blame! Best known in the U.S. for his work on Marvel Legends: Wolverine, manga-ka Tsutomu Nihei can be described as the William Gibson of manga cyberpunk. Through such manga works as Blame!, Noise and biosphere, Nihei has redefined and re-created the cyberpunk genre for the current generation of manga readers.

This summer his work will be featured in Bungie Studios' and Marvel Comics' Halo Graphic Novel, a collection of stories by a number of artists based on the wildly popular video game. The Halo Graphic Novel will very likely spark even more interest in 'Nihei's work, which despite his popularity in Japan, France and Germany has received mixed response from American readers. Last summer, Tokyopop introduced his seminal work, Blame! to the U.S. market. Nominated for a Harvey Award for Best American Edition of Foreign Material, the series is up to volume four (vol. 5 wil be published in August) but still trying to find 'its American audience. This December, Nihei is scheduled to return to the U.S. as guest of honor at the Phoenix Anime Fest.

In Blame!, Nihei takes the familiar storyline of one man on a mission and turns it on its head. The series is a dark narrative about a man called Killy, who's searching for a mysterious entity in a decimated urban landscape. Crumbling walls and broken-down buildings, as well as cyborgs and monstrous human mutations, make up much of the world. Before his career in comics, Nihei was an architect and didn't start thinking about creating comics until he was working in a New York architecture firm—this may explain the detail he puts into depicting a layered and disemboweled cityscape.

Tokypop editor Luis Reyes, who edits the Blame! series, acknowledges that it hasn't sold as well as expected. But he is also looking to the Halo Graphic Novel to have an impact on Blame!, which he describes as standing out both graphically and narratively from other manga. "Nihei is not interested in really telling the stories of individuals as much as he is interested in telling the story of worlds," says Reyes. "He pulls you through a completely unique world, with its own set of rules."

Unlike most of the licensed commercial manga imported into the U.S. market, there's little in the way of exaggerated emotion, romance or comedy in Blame!. There's no sex and no "fan-service"—the practice of including gratuitous references to sex in certain popular manga to please readers. And there's very little talking. Nihei's world is shrouded in mystery and vertical lines.

"It's vague, emotionally," says the director of the scanlation Web site Omanga, who prefers to go by his screen name, Zyph. Omanga initially scanned and translated Blame! back in 2001 before it was picked up for American publication. "In manga, we're frequently given what the character is thinking," says Zyph. "That's not true for Nihei's titles. We never really get to see what they're thinking. We just watch as they act."

Most comics readers in the U.S. are familiar with Nihei through his work on the Marvel Legends series. In 2003, Nihei worked on Wolverine and produced Snikt!, a six-issue series that placed Wolverine into Nihei's characteristically sparse and apocalyptic world. Pulled into a barren landscape of a parallel universe, Wolverine finds himself recruited by a young woman and her army to combat the Mandate, a phalanx of sentient flesh-eating microbes. According to Diamond Comics Distributors, the series shipped close to 45,000 copies of issue #1.

Matthew Kerwin, who runs the manga department at the science-fiction/comics shop Forbidden Planet in New York, says the series has been slowly growing its readership. And he also expects the Halo Graphic Novel to "pick up the American comics fanbase."

Zyph cites Nihei's popularity in Europe and attributes it to his books having the time to establish themselves in the market. "Blame! has been out in Europe longer than in the U.S," he says, noting that with a bit more promotion, a surge in Nihei's popularity is "just a matter of time. There's nothing like this in American comics. If you look at the style and the artwork, it's perfect for the American audience."

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