3 out of 5

With Blame! volume 3, Tsutomo Nihei proves a frustrating – but intriguing nonetheless – pattern, of having a few chapters of Killy wandering the surreal world the comic inhabits, only to run afoul of the techno-organic monstrosities now known as the Safeguard blocking his way.  Last volume’s revelations adds the clarity that the ‘guard are an automated response from ‘the net’ – drawing on local resources to construct its bodies – to attack threats, making for a frightening setup wherein the badguy is endless and purely out to get you; this also sharpens Killy’s (and now Cibo’s) mission to find the net terminal genes to shut down the program, and thus to keep going.  Blame!, in other words, keeps getting more and more focused and interesting, whether by design or by Nihei’s plannings growing as he worked.  Which is the frustrating / intriguing imbalance of the structure mentioned: As soon as you get your footing, the world explodes and you have to struggle through the wordless art to regain context.  To that extent, Nihei’s sketchiness keeps getting more refined, balanced between foreground and background, trying to reign in the detailing to make it clear what’s your focus and what’s happening, but still, the ideas get so literally big toward the end of this volume that tracking a speck that’s supposed to be Killy amongst giant monstrosities and non-stop explosions becomes near impossible.  You can follow the overall flow, and the time-warping slow-mo / fast-mo is smoothed out, but I look forward to even further refinement to this process, as seen in the much clearer work of Knights of Sidonia.  Again, the flip-side to this artistic madness is that the base madness fueling it is addictive; we want to now more, and the few characters with which we’re dealing are given curiously intriguing new attributes by the chapter.

Blame! has evolved in potential and complexity from volume to volume.  But there’s a steep learning curve to the art that makes grasping the growing-more-defined-but-still-vague strands of the plot difficult, even when your jaw is dropping at the same time over the conceptual and visual spirit on the pages.