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What Is NOiSE, the Blame! Prequel?

NOiSE is the one volume where the City is still small, the Safeguard is still an idea, and everything that will go wrong has a name: the Order.

Before Killy, there was a police officer. NOiSE, serialized in Kodansha’s Afternoon Season Zokan from February 2000 to May 2001 and collected in a single volume that October, is set some 3,000 years before Blame!, in a crowded underground city where the Megastructure is still a construction project and the Netsphere still has administrators.

Officer Susono Musubi, investigating a string of child abductions, finds a sword shaped like an early Gravitational Beam Emitter and crosses a fanatical cult, the Order: the same Order whose retrovirus, in the later account, erases the Net Terminal Gene from humanity. NOiSE is where Silicon Life begins, where the Safeguard’s mandate is first spoken aloud, and where Nihei shows the world while it could still have been saved.

THE BOOK ITSELF

One volume, three works

NOiSE Japanese tankobon cover, Afternoon KC, 2001

NOiSE · Afternoon KC · 2001

The single Japanese volume: Musubi in armor with the sword form of the Beam Emitter, cover dated October 23, 2001.

The prototype rides along

The NOiSE volume also collects Blame, the 1995 prize winning one-shot that started everything, so the first version of Killy stands at the back of his own prequel.

Negative Corridor

A five page short closes the volume, a corridor study in the same visual language: the City as pure architecture, before it had a plot.

IN ENGLISH

A long road to print

Tokyopop, 2007

Tokyopop’s single volume arrived December 11, 2007, translated by Stephen Paul, and went out of print with the rest of its Blame! line.

Kodansha USA, 2016 and 2022

Kodansha USA brought NOiSE back digitally on June 28, 2016, and in print at last on November 29, 2022, restoring the prequel to the shelf beside the Master Edition.

What Is NOiSE, the Blame! Prequel?

THE BOOK ITSELF

IN ENGLISH

THE FIRST WORD