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Who Is Tsutomu Nihei?

He worked construction, studied design in New York, quit both, and became the artist who draws the largest buildings in comics.

Tsutomu Nihei was born on February 26, 1971, in Koriyama, Fukushima. Before manga there was building: he worked in construction, then crossed the Pacific and studied at the Parsons School of Design in New York. His own account of the pairing is the key to his work: the construction years and the design years show up in his manga in the depiction of huge structures, which became his signature theme.

Back in Japan he assisted Tsutomu Takahashi on Jiraishin, won the 1995 Afternoon Four Seasons Award with the one-shot Blame, and in 1997 launched Blame! in Monthly Afternoon as his first series. The path from there runs through Marvel, a Halo graphic novel he was offered because the game’s own designers were his fans, and Knights of Sidonia, the series that took him from cult figure to award winner.

THE INFLUENCES

What fed the City

Giger and Moebius

Nihei names H. R. Giger’s biomechanical art and Jean “Moebius” Giraud among his strongest inspirations, alongside Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Clive Barker. The City is where those two lineages meet: organism and cathedral.

The manga shelf

His stated Japanese influences are Akira, Miyazaki’s Nausicaä manga and Ghost in the Shell: three works that also build worlds larger than their plots.

The games

A declared games fan, with Metroid and the Halo series among his favorites. The influence ran both ways, as the next section shows.

AFTER BLAME!

2003 to 2009

Wolverine: Snikt! (2003)

Marvel hired the Blame! artist for a five issue Wolverine series the year his own series ended: the City’s aesthetic, let loose in another universe.

Breaking Quarantine (2006)

Nihei met the Halo design team on a trip to the United States; learning he was a huge fan of the game, they offered him a story in The Halo Graphic Novel. He drew Sergeant Johnson’s escape from the Flood, wordlessly, in pure Blame! grammar.

Biomega and Abara

Biomega (2004 to 2009) rides a motorcycle through another ruined future; Abara (2005 to 2006) is his densest, darkest short series, later nominated for an Eisner Award in its English edition.

THE MAINSTREAM

Sidonia and after

Knights of Sidonia (2009 to 2015)

His most successful series: a generation ship at war, and the first of his works adapted as a television anime. It won the Kodansha Manga Award in the general category in 2015 and the Seiun Award for best comic in 2016.

The Inkpot (2016)

San Diego Comic-Con made him a special guest and gave him its Inkpot Award, an honor he shares with Osamu Tezuka, Moebius and Ray Bradbury.

Still building

Aposimz (2017 to 2021) freezes the megastructure; Kaina of the Great Snow Sea (2022 to 2024) pairs his writing with Itoe Takemoto’s art; Tower Dungeon, from October 2023, turns the vertical city into a fantasy tower. In 2024 he even released a typeface named for Toha Heavy Industries.

Who Is Tsutomu Nihei?

THE INFLUENCES

AFTER BLAME!

THE MAINSTREAM

THE FIRST WORD