4 out of 5

Blame!, take 2?  Nah.  Biomega or Knights of Sidonia, the prequel?  Come on.

Fans / followers of Tsutomu Nihei accept this: that any given one of his works is likely to behave similarly to any other one – this was the case even when playing with American properties like Wolverine or HALO – with a stoic, ultimate-weapon-possessor lead, some kind of human/technology hybrid that’s destroyed or destroying the world, and lots of long, long staircases that I become exhausted just looking at.

But we are fans / followers for a reason: even setting aside the visual bravado of Tsutomu’s style, with its half-Escher, half-realized winding and cavernous structures and insanely creepy, gothic, Giger creatures blasting sizable holes into those structures with vaguely sciencey super weapons, we get the fascinating ideas that kick along these stories – or give them shape, since Tsutomu, especially in his earlier works, is big on minimalism in terms of explaining things – and the shades of difference from tale to tale that somehow make them each become these massive, self-contained but also linked stories.  And he keeps doing this – even repeating proper names and concepts like this is all one universe but it’s not – and it keeps working.

In Abara, Blame!’s confined world is exchanged for a desolate, open one, with giant mausoleum silos dotted here and there.  Zoom in close, and Nihei’s love of detailed, nightmare architecture is still in play.  We zoom in further on Kudou Denji, approached by Observation Bureau – the super secret government – agent Tadohomi, who does the whole ‘Denji – you’re the only one who can save us’ routine.  From: gauna; giant, mutating masses that want nothing but – for whatever reason – to destroy those mausoleums.  The Bureau has a few pieces in play to prevent this, such as types like Denji: humans who can harness their own wicked gauna skills.  Much fighting ensues, with pieces of ‘what’s going on?’ passed between Tadohomi , two other Bureau agents – Nayuta and Ayuta – and the cop who’s gotten mixed up in this business, Sakijima.  But mostly it’s fighting.  And it’s glorious.

Nihei is still drawing with a very sketchy style at this point in his career, but he’s pared down the excessive lines, on par with the last couple volumes of Blame!  Sisters Nayuta and Ayuta look the same, but their place in the narrative allows you to tell them apart; otherwise we get distinct characters since Denji is the only handsome dude with a gauna suit, Tadohomi the sole key female with dark hair, and Sakijima has a beard.  (Nihei is great with attitude and small emotional tics, but, yeah, when you’re dealing with many characters, they can blend together.)  The gauna designs are fantastically cool.  The battle sequences happen on the usual Tsutomu scale, in which relatively tiny characters cause insane amounts of damage, so there’s the learning curve of knowing how to “follow” the action, but it’s much clearer and better delineated than most of Blame!, so once I got used to the pacing – gaunas move between seconds – I was flipping pages like a fiend, following the madness.

Abara is another entry in Nihei’s obsession with man’s addiction to both manipulating oneself and controlling others.  It’s not as layered as Blame!, but it delivers its setup much more effectively and directly, and gives us another Tsutomu world in which to revel.