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Biomega Volume 3 Review

By Jason Glick 1 year, 5 months ago

JasonG Keeps It Simple.

Tsutomu Nihei’s Biomega has been the most pleasant surprise amongst all the manga I’ve read so far this year. I say “surprise” in the sense that I wasn’t expecting much after his previous work, the ten-volume cyber-dungeon-crawling epic BLAME!, ultimately left me cold. While BLAME! set up a lot of intriguing mysteries, it ultimately failed to resolve them in any meaningful way. So imagine my surprise when I picked up the first volume of this series and found it to be a satisfying example of how to put style over substance.

The world of Biomega is one where things like moral ambiguity and depth of character are sidelined in favor of blowing things up in the most awesome way possible. Its heroes are two agents of Toa Heavy industry, Zoichi and Nishu, who both pack lots of high-impact weaponry and and ride badass motorbikes. Their opponents are the agents of the Data Research Foundation, who range in appearance from creepy masked administrative drones to barely human drones of mass destruction.

There’s also a talking Russian bear named Kozlov who specializes in sniping. Why is there a talking Russian bear who specializes in sniping in this book? Don’t ask questions, just accept that it is awesome and move on.

Since his work on BLAME!, Nihei’s art has only become richer and more focused. This is a nightmare vision of the future where the familiar aspects of today have been mechanized to the point of monstrosity. While the whole book looks great, it really shines during the action sequences. Vol. 3 has some particularly striking ones as Nishu takes on a flying fortress that’s spreading around a mutagen which is rapidly dissolving the city around her. Later on, Zoichi arrives at one of the DRF’s bases and proceeds to unleash holy hell on the bad, bad men holding the captive Eon Green there.

Now Eon is the series’ MacGuffin and the key to its simplicity. Rather than set up a mysterious setting with mysterious goals as he did in BLAME!, Nihei has simplified the thrust of his story to the barest of essentials: Eon is the key to stopping the bio-zombie outbreak, and she must be saved from the bad bad men who are out to use her for their own ends. Things get a little more complicated in this volume with the introduction of the “reverse morphic polymer” and the revelation that there are warring factions within the DRF. I’m willing to give Nihei some leeway with introducing new elements here as he has now shown that he understands the fundamentals of storytelling, something I wasn’t sure about before reading this series.

If that sounds like I’m damning him with faint praise, that’s because I am. No one will ever mistake the story in Biomega for being a modern classic. While I applaud him for telling a coherent one this time out, there are still a number of scenes that are needlessly hard to follow or just plain impenetrable. I liked the fight scene in the first chapter of this volume, but I had no real idea why these people were fighting or when the scene took place in relation to the main story. The story’s main purpose is to facilitate and provide context for the action scenes. That it succeeds in this fashion makes its simplicity and rudimentary nature forgivable rather than annoying.

While I can’t imagine anyone starting to read this series at the third volume, those of you who have been reading so far will likely be very entertained by what’s on display here. Rather than finding out whether or not Zoichi and Nishu will save the world, I’m more interested in seeing what cool and bizzare things they’ll be fighting in the volumes to come.

Biomega is published by Viz Media, and is available wherever books about Russian bears with rifles are sold.

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