What Is Blame Academy!?

It is Blame! retold as a school comedy: the same cast, the same deadpan, homeroom instead of the Megastructure.

Between 2004 and 2008, in irregular installments in Monthly Afternoon, Tsutomu Nihei did something nobody expected of the quietest manga in Japan: he sent his cast to school. Blame Academy! recasts Killy, Cibo, Sanakan and the Safeguard as students and teachers in a school that keeps the series’ visual grammar and drops its stakes to zero, deadpan intact.

Kodansha collected the chapters in 2008 as Blame Gakuen! and So On, a single volume that also gathers short work from the same years. A new Japanese edition followed in February 2018, in the slipstream of the film, and Kodansha Comics released the book in English digitally in March 2017. It remains the strangest object on the Blame! shelf: proof that Nihei’s silence was always a choice, and that he finds his own mythology funny.

THE COLLECTION

Blame Gakuen! and So On

2008 · The first collection

One volume from Kodansha, September 19, 2008, gathering the irregular Afternoon chapters of 2004 to 2008.

2018 · The new edition

A fresh Japanese edition on February 9, 2018, the same day as the film’s manga adaptation volume, aimed at the audience the Netflix film had just made.

2017 · In English

Kodansha Comics released Blame Academy! and So On in English as a digital first edition on March 21, 2017. No English print edition has followed in the sources.

THE OTHER SHORT RETURNS

One-shots at the edge of the City

NSE: NetSphere Engineer (2004)

A one-shot sequel published in Bessatsu Morning on December 16, 2004: a lone engineer walks a far future City long after Killy’s era.

Blame!² (2008)

A sixteen page full color sequel one-shot in Kodansha’s Mandala in March 2008, following the eighth incarnation of Pcell on her escape from the Megastructure: the farthest future Nihei has drawn.

Fortress of Silicon Creatures (2017)

A fourteen page full color epilogue Nihei drew for the film, bundled only with the Japanese limited edition Blu-ray: the rarest Blame! comic of all, and a collecting note in its own right.

What Is Blame Academy!?

THE COLLECTION

THE OTHER SHORT RETURNS

THE FIRST WORD