4 out of 5

All of your questions about Blame!… answered!  Heh, hardly.  This ‘prequel’ to Blame!, taking place in the same ‘universe,’ provides the type of tenuous insights those quotes might suggest.  That is: just as you’re very much left to construct your own understanding of Builders, and Silicon Life, and Net Terminal Genes, and the Authority in Blame!, with Nihei tip-toeing some details along the way, Blame! gives us proto-versions of some of those elements, but if you wanted to view this with the same type of rules that allows Toho Heavy Industries to exist – separately – in ever Tsutomu creation, that’d be fine as well.  In fact, Noise may stand better on its own, as a Hellraiser-ish nightmare of corruptive technology taking over in a goddamn instant: cop Susono investigates the disappearance of her partner, leading her to a weirdo cult, kids with internet-ready jacks in their necks, and disturbing meshes of organics and plastics and… silicon… and then as soon as those elements are introduced, the world just goes insane.  There’s no buildup, no lead-in, but in Nihei’s worlds, that’s a compliment: the intense, claustrophobic architecture for which the artist is known is already in place in Susono’s base reality, dripping dread from every panel, just waiting for whatever the newest variation of dreadful life is around the corner.

That said, it is fun trying to add this to whatever head canon you’ve built up regarding Blame!, wondering why this cop eventually starts to look like Killy, though maybe that’s because Nihei just draws every stoic character the same

Something which really doesn’t work here, though, is the ‘dialogue,’ which you’ll also note is in quotes.  Blame!’s few characters are defined by their silence; by the minimalism of their interactions.  Later books would be more talky as Nihei would get better at balancing his open-ended storytelling with hard sci-fi setups and actual human beings, but early on, trying to give people emotions wasn’t really in his wheelhouse.  So Susono’s proclamations regarding finding her partner fall incredibly flat, and are clearly just pointers to get the story going.  Oh well.  It’s only a few pages of that before it dang gets going.

Also included in the Tokypop edition of this are two shorts, both of which show a fascination with the promise and horrors of our melding with higher level tech…