Killy – What the bleedin’ heck is going on?

Killy: …..

One of the interesting – though frustrating, if you’re not on the mood for it – aspects of Blame! is the way in which Tsutomu Nihei appears to structure the landscape and general plotbeats as the story unfolds.  This is different from absolutely making things up on the fly, as I fully believe Nihei knew the direction his tale would take, bit because the general conceit is absolutely tied with its characters’ literal progress, he can let his surreal settings drive the action in any given sequence.  I’m still learning how to read Blame!, but what this has meant is a slightly uphill (womp) climb from page to page, and then, once the general dynamic and flow is understood, you can travel back through those same pages and get your balance.

Book 1 had a slightly more wandering Ronin aspect to it; Book 2, though, is all rush, away from battles and in to new ones, which makes it – due to the pacing described above – as discouraging as it is rewarding.  But once I can set aside that desire for a linear read and just be shoved alongside Killy as he bounces from floor to floor, I get to share in that rush.  And furthermore, once you can learn to respond like Killy, who also doesn’t really know what’s going on beyond his quest for ‘net terminal genes,’ and that people (?) keep standing in his path toward that goal, the rush becomes a drug; onward, upward, shoot first, keep going.

Book 2 gives us a little more understanding of Net Terminal Genes, and glimpses of a fascinating matrix-like computer vs. reality structure to the world, but one in which the setup is some type of arrangement instead of a trick.  I would say there’s a good guys vs. bad guys confusion going on here which initially felt like a visual story-telling problem (no clear cues for whom to root), but as friends and enemies are met and ditched in the book, it seems more likely an intended theme; that book 2 starts to have such themes is what makes it more compelling than the first.

Nihei’s layouts have the same kind of learning curve as his story-telling style, time dilation all over the place, his preference to slow things down immensely whenever Killy shoots that massive gun, and then jump over gigantic moments during chases with only the barest visual connections to indicate how we got from A to B.  It works in fits, but does vibe with how Blame!’s world seems to organically morph along with the story, which, in essence, is still just about a vertically-structured world in which Killy’s MacGuffin is contained on the top floor.

There’s more here than meets the eye, which supports it through its most abstract moments.  But book 2 ties its abstractions together a bit more than book 1, which makes me a glutton for the read-and-reread punishments sure to come in book 3.