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.…