NOiSE

• 1. Introduction

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  NOiSE is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Tsutomu Nihei, and it holds a particular place in his body of work: it is the prequel to his ten-volume series Blame! The reader who comes to NOiSE expecting to understand where a vast, nightmarish architecture came from will find exactly that. What draws a young police officer into a story about child abductions? How does a sprawling, dystopian underground city come into being? And where does a weapon as strange as a Gravitational Beam Emitter first appear? Those questions pull the narrative forward.

• 2. A City Beneath the World

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  Susono Musubi is a young police officer working in a dystopian subterranean city. The city thrives with activity, which makes the disappearance of children all the more unsettling against that backdrop. Musubi is the protagonist investigating those abductions, and through her case, Nihei introduces the Megastructure that dominates his Blame! universe. NOiSE reveals something about the Megastructure's origins and its initial size, details that the later, longer series leaves largely in shadow. The city Musubi patrols is not the endless, near-dead labyrinth that Blame! depicts; it is a living, populated place, which makes it a rare window into what came before the collapse.

• 3. Familiar Objects, Early Forms

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  During her investigation, Susono Musubi encounters a sword-like Gravitational Beam Emitter. The weapon is heavily toned down compared to the version that appears in Blame!, where it functions as an almost incomprehensibly powerful tool. NOiSE also introduces Silicon Life, the category of entity that becomes a central threat in Blame!, though it takes different forms here. Nihei uses these objects and beings as early sketches, letting readers trace how his concepts evolved between the two works. The gap between the prototype and the finished idea is part of what makes NOiSE valuable to anyone trying to understand the full scope of Nihei's universe.

• 4. From Serialization to Tankōbon

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  NOiSE was serialized in Kodansha's seinen manga magazine from the 10th of February 2000 to the 10th of May 2001. Kodansha then collected those chapters into a single tankōbon volume, which it released on the 20th of October 2001. That single volume also contains a bonus work: Blame, a one-shot prototype for the Blame! series. That prototype originally appeared in the October 1995 issue of Monthly Afternoon, predating the serialized NOiSE by several years. Its inclusion in the tankōbon gives readers a compact history of Nihei's evolving vision, from the earliest Blame prototype through to the prequel story.

• 5. Reaching English Readers

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  Tokyopop licensed NOiSE for English release in North America and published the single volume on the 11th of December 2007. That edition brought Nihei's prequel to a new audience years after its Japanese publication. The story did not stop there: Kodansha USA later issued a digital re-release on the 28th of June 2016, and a print edition followed on the 29th of November 2022. The 2022 print release arrived more than two decades after the original Japanese tankōbon, giving a new generation of readers access to the origins of Silicon Life and the Megastructure in a format they could hold in their hands.