I’d make the rather bold statement that Blame! is an essential part of the canon of japanese manga. Nihei creates such a fascinating aesthetic masterpiece here it’s truly outstanding. It’s like a gothic fantasy fitted perfectly over a science fiction superstructure of a story. What you have is this use of technology to appear strange and alien to our POV, architecture and infrastructure, things that we consider to be essentially man-made are instead twisted to become hostile and incomprehensible. This leads to this bewildering and discomforting world, our minds naturally have been taught to conflate cities and urbanity with some kind of structure to humanity (even in cases where that structure is hostile). Yet, in Nihei’s city there is no social structure or civilization, it’s pure chaos beyond human control. The things we built to keep ourselves safe and ordered have become like those haunting forests from the fairytales full of danger and mystery we cannot understand.