5 out of 5

Holy crow, I finally get it.  I mean, I’m not ready to teach a class on it, but with volume 5 of Nihei’s BLAME!, the Master Edition – my third time through the series – the relationship between ‘base reality,’ The City, Net Terminal Genes, Silicon Life, The Authority, The Safeguard… goddamn, it’s finally clicking.  And yes, while I’m sure those triplicate readings have helped, the Master Edition’s slight dialogue tweaks and massive cleanup of the art making reading this a properly puzzling labyrinth of insanely-scoped battles and massively-complex-but-simple sci-fi ideas instead of a fascinating but convoluted one, which summarizes my two previous Tokyopop readthrough experiences.

In volume 5, Logs 43 – 54, things come to a head as Cibo transforms into an end state and Killy / Kyrri starts his endless journey back up post being exploded and reconstructing himself… and Blame! seems to shift into another cycle with, sort of, another set of characters and focuses while actually maintaining the same exact path.  At this point in the story, while Nihei’s artwork had tightened immensely, he fell into blotting his pages with insane blackness (or at least the Tokyopop printings did), making it so, so difficult to discern what was going on at points.  Vertical Comics has already made a hugely positive impression with its cleanup, but its even more above and more beyond here – seeing the core art of these pages cleaned up so extensively while maintaining all of the mood and detail (even on the colored pages) is a revelation, and, I’d say, has helped me appreciate the story on an entirely new level.

The covers on these have also been very striking, but volume 5’s take on the front cover / back cover flipped perspectives feels particularly dynamic.