Blame! by Tsutomu Nihei

I never really know how to start when talking about Blame!.

It’s probably the single most influential comic (manga) for my personal art journey. Every time I see an image from it online, I can’t help but freeze and stare like an idiot for a full minute — which, by internet standards, is an eternity.

The story itself is messy, fragmented, and often hard to follow, but that’s not what hooked me. What hits like a truck is the art style: unapologetic lines, massive brutalist structures, and architecture that completely ignores any notion of human comfort. It’s raw, harsh, and indifferent to the people wandering inside it.

Corridors, staircases, walkways, and endless rooms stretching into infinity — that’s the stuff that gets under my skin. Tsutomu Nihei has made it a signature element. Even in his newer works, the obsession with impossibly large, non-Euclidean spaces remains central. It’s like the backrooms mythos, but not as a meme or creepypasta — here it’s part of the DNA of the story itself. In Blame!, humanity doesn’t just live in these spaces; it’s shaped by them. Nihei builds what you could call “anti-human architecture” — structures designed not for people, but for the indifference of infinity.

And here’s the dark twist: the world itself outlives humanity. The Megastructure keeps expanding without restraint, to the point where unmodified humans are no longer suited to survive inside it. People become fragile, “old,” outdated. The environment itself pushes evolution — not in a biological sense, but in a cybernetic one. Survival demands upgrades, mutations, or total replacement. In Nihei’s vision, the future doesn’t belong to us; it belongs to synthetic beings, silicon creatures, and AIs that can thrive where humans can’t.

That concept hit me so hard it bled into my own work. For my graduation project in Italy (where you actually have to create a full body of work around a chosen theme), I ended up building everything — a book, a short film, an illustrated collection, and even a photographic set — around the same idea: humanity trapped inside overwhelming structures, dwarfed by the very spaces it inhabits.

Nihei’s vision isn’t just about scale — it’s about perspective. It forces you to confront how small we are against the infinite, how fragile in the face of things that don’t care whether we exist or not. His work reads like architectural horror: spaces that reject us, a sublime immensity that reduces humanity to background noise. And that’s exactly why I keep coming back to it.

Tsutomu Nihei is a Japanese manga artist born on February 26, 1971. He was awarded the Jiro Taniguchi Special Prize in 1995 for his submission, Blame. Nihei has worked on several notable series, including Wolverine: Snikt!, Blame, Knights of Sidonia and Biomega.