4 out of 5

Knights is an insane leap forward, visually, from the first few volumes of Blame!, which is my only prior Nihei exposure.  From American eyes, it prompts an immediate gut reaction of “selling out,” the clean lines and polished faces much more in line with a traditional manga style versus the sketch-heavy Giger-esque bleakness of Blame!.  And then a simple page flip dispels any such dismissals, and moreso from page to page; this is progress; this is Nihei taking his visual proclivities for complex architecture and anatomical monstrosities and rendering it amidst a cleaner backdrop.  When you see pages that allow you to comprehend how fully blended the styles are, it’s a good shock; that this is combined with another sound story buildup is gimme-the-next-volume awesome.

At a high level, this is just giant robot fantasy stuff, which is certainly a genre for which I don’t know the name.  And lead Nagate Tanikaze is our fish-out-of-water savior, emerging into a land the customs of which are confusing, but entrusted – for mysterious reasons – to pilot the big ol’ mechas which police the sky from giant alien grossies called guanas.  But, as with Blame!’s surprising bumps in complexity over its lone hunter scheme, Sidonia keeps adding on layers of characters amd concepts through Nihei’s typical narrative cut-up format, that seemingly jumps around time but then subtly reveals its throughlines via mentions of one thing or another.  But there’s also plenty of experience at work here, smoothing out the ride: Tanikaze’s early existence below ground, unaware of the oddities of surface life, grounds us with the character in a way that sometimes gets skipped with intended epics like this, and the choice use of humor throughout – slapstick, sexual – keeps the tale from feeling to broad or big, while in the meantime Tanikaze can tease us with details of where this all may be going.

Still, some of the larger scale action sequences do get a tad confusing – not for tue major beats, though, which are expertly rendered – and that same slice and dice narrative cuts us off from some satisfying moments when we’ve just discovered / understood something cool about the Sidonia world, only to have the plot reroute.  Plus some relationship stuff feels a bit unnecessary this early on…  But the excitement regarding the evolving world and the way we quickly become endeared to our lead overcome such roadbumps, not to mention the easily-held belief that most of this will develop into even better things.

Certainly an exciting start.