My Cultural Diet

At first, Biomega feels like a bit of a retread of Nihei’s magnum opus, Blame!. Both series feature a taciturn protagonist who travels through an increasingly bizarre post-apocalyptic landscape while battling transhuman horrors with the help of a tiny but super-powerful gun, all in the hopes of discovering the cure to a plague that’s devastating humanity. In the end, Blame! remains the superior work — Biomega’s story really goes off the rails in its final volumes, with an ending that feels rushed and incoherent — but it’s to Nihei’s credit as an artist that Biomega still carves out its own unique identity. Nihei’s architectural background serves him well in Biomega’s early volumes, allowing him to fill his pages with intricate, stunningly envisioned dystopian cities and gothic environments. His crafting of thrilling action sequences with just a bare minimum of panels is also second-to-none, as he draws his series’ taciturn protagonist — a super-powered synthetic human named Zoichi Kanoe who just so happens to have a bad-ass motorcycle — driving up the side of skyscrapers, into the air against fighter jets, and even into outer space.

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