The History of Blame!
A prize winning one-shot became a six year walk through the end of architecture.
Blame! began as a contest entry. In 1995 Tsutomu Nihei submitted a one-shot called Blame to Kodansha’s Afternoon Four Seasons Award and won the Jiro Taniguchi Special Prize. After a stint assisting Tsutomu Takahashi on Jiraishin, he returned to Monthly Afternoon and launched the series proper on January 25, 1997.
It ran for six and a half years, to July 25, 2003, in chapters Nihei called LOGs: 65 numbered logs and two EX-LOGs, collected in ten tankobon volumes. It was his first series, and it made his reputation in one move: a nearly wordless cyberpunk quest through a structure so large that nobody inside it remembers the ground.
THE ROAD IN
1995 to 19971995 · The prize
The one-shot Blame wins the Jiro Taniguchi Special Prize at the Afternoon Four Seasons Award. Judge Jiro Taniguchi, Nihei later recalled, praised his paneling and framing above everything.
The assistant years
Nihei works under Tsutomu Takahashi, creator of Jiraishin, learning the trade on a hard boiled crime manga before returning to his own contest world.
25 January 1997 · The launch
Blame! begins serialization in Monthly Afternoon, Kodansha’s seinen flagship, where it will run alongside the magazine’s most experimental titles.
THE RUN
1997 to 2003Logs, not chapters
Every installment is a LOG, a system record from a world run by machines. Two extra EX-LOGs sit outside the numbering, early experiments folded into volumes 1 and 2.
Ten volumes
The tankobon arrive from June 1998 to September 2003 under the Afternoon KC label. The full cover row is documented in this Library’s Blame! gallery.
The wordless turn
Volume by volume the dialogue thins until whole logs pass in silence: the City itself becomes the narrator. It is the choice that made the series famous, and the one every later Nihei work is measured against.
THE AFTERLIFE
2003 to today2003 · First screen version
Group TAC produces Blame! Ver. 0.11, six short net anime episodes with a seventh on DVD, the same year the manga ends.
2015 · The Master Edition
Kodansha reissues the series in Japan as a six volume large format Master Edition, the basis for Vertical’s English edition of 2016.
2017 · The film
Polygon Pictures’ animated film reaches Netflix worldwide and Japanese cinemas in May 2017, twenty years after the first log. The walk continues in new editions on both sides of the Pacific.