Books: Biomega Vol. #1 (Tsutomu Nihei)

Tsutomu Nihei creates spectacular manga about giant, rotting, manmade landscapes where stern-looking men and bizarre-looking monsters stalk about and do their best to blow each other up.

That’s about all his previous Big Thing, Blame!, amounted to in my eyes, which showed up in English in both its manga and animated incarnations. I awarded it plenty of points for sheer visual exhilaration, and took away about as many for having only as much story as might be needed to hustle everyone from one act of violence to the next.

From what I can make of Biomega so far, it’s more of the same. Bad thing? Good thing? A good thing, I guess: many people I know are perfectly happy with manga that aims no higher than the part of the cerebral cortex that gets happy when things go boom. In Biomega, many things do indeed go boom, from a giant crumbling castle leaning out of the side of a cliff face to a whole fleet of ICBMs. The missiles, by the way, go boom in a way that had me gibbering “No … no … no,” long before I ever turned the page and confirmed that the hero was indeed going to make them go boom in the single craziest way imaginable. I suspect I would have been disappointed if he hadn’t done it that way.

Article originally written for AMN. Click here to read full text.