After years of replaying a conversation with an editor who described Tsutomu Nihei’s Blame! with near-religious reverence as “a masterpiece in comic storytelling,” I finally sat down to see what all the fuss was about. Having read it for myself after only experiencing Polygon Pictures’ CG film adaptation, I’m still a ways from claiming to have fully untangled every thread of its circuitous story. What I can say is that I now understand why that editor spoke about the series with such reverence, even though the reasons I fell in love with it weren’t the ones I expected.

Before giving Blame! an honest try, all I could recall from the aforementioned Netflix film was a dude wandering aimlessly through a desolate sci-fi wasteland. If anything stuck with me, it was his absurdly cool gun. Even without reading the manga, the Gravitational Beam Emitter’s reputation preceded it. Its name hangs in the rafters alongside the most iconic weapons in sci-fi and manga. Basically, any problem its aptly named protagonist, Killy, encounters is immediately solved by pulling its trigger and watching a beam tear through anything fool enough to obstruct his path.

R. Giger-inspired adversaries fully understood it—would be the series’ main point of intrigue. After all, Blame! itself takes its name from the thunderous onomatopoeia of the firearm before its kickback sends Killy flat on his ass or rips his arm clean off. By all accounts, the GBE seemed destined to be the thing I’d spend the entire manga obsessing over.

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