Tsutomu Nihei

Blame! by Tsutomu Nihei is my favorite manga.

Contents

What influenced Blame!

Great Sky River and Feersum Endjinn

Two English-language science fiction novels. Great Sky River1987 is by Gregory Benford, and Feersum Endjinn1994 is by Iain M. Banks. See “Books that (could have) inspired BLAME!” on heeen’s Blame! forum.

H. R. Giger

The influence, especially through Alien1979, is apparent.

Zdzisław Beksiński

Go to blameSphere 2.0 and click “Inspiration”. You will see panels (from the end of chapter 24, volume 4) that directly reference Beksiński’s untitled 1978 painting. The painting depicts a field of buttes stretching to the horizon with skeletal figures huddled around a fire atop each butte. I noticed a lot of Beksiński in the color segment of chapter 19 of the same volume.

Works influenced by Nihei

NaissanceE2014

An exploration video game for Windows. Released on Steam.

Abandoned video game projects

bac9.tumblr.com

The project blog has some nice black-and-white 3D renders inspired by Blame!. Updates were posted in 2014–2015. The Introduction talks about what gives Nihei’s architecture a sense of scale.

So, few years ago I started by trying to copy some of his environments. It’s not a very trivial task despite minimal style some of them are executed in. Even if some surface is composed from large plates with lots of white space, it still relies on sharp and tiny details to convey the sense of scale properly - human-sized doors, rust, leaks, power cables, staircases - they are always somewhere, and help a lot to give a clear visual difference between 10m high wall and 1km high wall.

Megastructure

TIGSource Forums thread. Updates were posted in 2016–2017.