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Tsutomu Nihei's Blame Manga Gets Animated in Knights of Sidonia
posted on by Egan Loo
The January issue of Kodansha's Monthly Afternoon magazine is announcing on Tuesday that Tsutomu Nihei's Blame! manga will be animated within Sidonia no Kishi: Dai-kyū Wakusei Seneki (Knights of Sidonia: War of the Ninth Planet), the second Knights of Sidonia anime season. The second Knights of Sidonia season will premiere next April in the Animeism programming block, and the character Tsumugi will "appear at last." Hiroyuki Seshita, the assistant director of the first season, is replacing Kobun Shizuno as the director of the second season at Polygon Pictures, and Sadayuki Murai is returning to be in charge of the series scripts.
Nihei launched the science-fiction action story Blame! as his first manga series in Monthly Afternoon in 1997, and ended it in 2003. Tokyopop published the manga in North America and describes the story:
Killy is a man of few words. He wanders, seemingly endlessly, through a lonely, gargantuan labyrinth of concrete and steel, fighting off cyborgs and other futuristic nightmares, searching only for something called Net Terminal Genes. And he has a very powerful gun, which he uses without hesitation whenever anything resembling danger rears its ugly head.Who is this quiet, violent, determined man and what are these Genes he seeks? The small communities he finds tucked into the crevices of this towering, dystopic ruin hardly give him leads on his treasure, driving him to find larger enclaves of civilization where people can reveal more about the world he lives in and the quarry he seeks.
If Killy is going to find the treasure he seeks, he will need more help and information than the inhabitants of these beleaguered outposts can offer. He needs to find a larger cluster of civilization, but he'll have to survive the trip to get there, first...
The Blame! manga already inspired an original net anime project in 2003, and Micott and Basara (Appleseed) announced at Tokyo International Anime Fair 2007 that a CG film was in the works. However, this proposed CG film project was not released before Micott and Basara filed for bankruptcy in 2011.
