Blame!, 1997-2003, Nihei, Tsutomu, Afternoon

STORY: 6

Meet Killy, a mysterious man with a few words in a future where even the concepts of time and space seem to be lost. His mission is to find a human whose genes have not been altered too much. Those genes are the only way for humans to re-establish contact with the net sphere, a space or entity that is cut from the rest of the world, in order to remove the looming threat of annihilation.
Silicon life, Toha Heavy Industries, Safeguards, the plot can be confusing sometimes, so, if you  cannot get in its particular flow, the story will simply be “a boy with a big gun goes up a LOT of stairs, looking to repair wifi”.

If you manage to get in, the atmosphere is the main point of this manga, especially scale: everything is so huge that things happen within a maze of structures that has been here long enough so that everybody forgot its origin or purpose (even writing has almost disappeared) and its boundaries are unknown. The few things alive in this artificial world need to survive against other factions but also machines that have gone rogue or, for some, function as they should although they are useless or dangerous in the current post-collapse context.
Blame! is dark, dystopian, eerie, and almost with a poetic quality, it’s close to being a sci-fi classic but it alas it lacks in clarity.

ART: 6

A lot of line and darkness, this is no clean art here. Panels can be confusing at times, especially during fights (which is half of the manga, the other half consists of hiking), but that sketchbook feeling gives a lot of character to the manga.

POLITICAL POTENTIAL: 6

Killy, the protagonist, meets different groups on his quest, each with a different state of distress and stability, but knowledge about the global picture is certainly lost. Most of his interactions are murderous and he is up to genocide when he finds a group of cyborgs named silicon life.
The best political content is definitely about economic growth: in Blame’s world, extractivism, development and science are left unchecked and it’s not pretty. Perpetual growth has reached a point where humans are almost irrelevant now. The maze of buildings is so vast that it’s almost impossible to find something that’s not artificial. Although civilization has collapsed, there is no comeback of nature, and ruins are slowly decaying without being overgrown by plants or anything. Even the sky is not visible, most of the landscape is moving, animated by rogue machines and seemingly infinite, green energy (the dream of many apolitical ecologists today), but there is barely any life, mostly an immense, empty, megastructure.

Written more than 20 years ago, this perspective is becoming even more interesting today since the mass of human infrastructure became larger than the global biomass in 2020 and AI creeping shadow is looming closer on us! So what about looking for sobriety instead of clean energy?

FEMINISM: 6

Despite how altered the human race is in Blame, genders seem to still stick around. Women, however, are not treated much different than others in this manga and their (more or less artificial) bodies are long and skinny, without unnecessary male gaze. This is in sharp contrast with the movie version of Blame! that was drawn 15 years later, and features some of the same protagonists with sexualized bodies and ridiculous breasts, what a regression.
There is a few scenes were women are exploited in laboratories for their genes or reproductive capacities but, for a title that has so many violent deaths, it is quite a miracle that there is not a single scene of sexual assault to be found.

CONCLUSION: 6

Give Blame! a try. You will either be confused by the plot and annoyed by the sketchy art, or, be dragged along the epic urban exploration of a murderous administrative agent for a few hundred thousand kilometers of dystopian hiking!