BIOMEGA

The Midnight Meat Train Summoning

BIOMEGA

BIOMEGA vol. 1

Written and illustrated by Tsutomu Nihei

Published by VIZ Media (English), 2010 – 2011

Dark sci-fi/action/horror

Available in paperback

ISBN: 978-1421531847; 978-1421531854; 978-1421531861; 978-1421531878; 978-1421531885; 978-1421532776

Three-and-a-half stars

BIOMEGA 2

Fair warning: this is a review of a six-volume manga, not a prose book.

Roughly one millennia from now, the N5S virus is swiftly covering the earth, turning humans into drones (re: zombies). A young girl named Eon Green might hold the cure in her genes. "Synthetic humans" Zoichi and Nishu are sent to find her before anyone with apocalyptic designs on the human race does, and they'd better hurry: their enemies have decided to "baptize" the entire planet with N5S. But why? Have they gone mad, or do they have some sinister plan for the zombified human race?

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The minute I opened the first volume of BIOMEGA, I was hooked. The dark, detailed art sucked me in and made the action-heavy story race forward. Full of nightmare monsters, awesome sci-fi mechanics, and inventive ideas like talking Russian bears and sentient motorcycles, BIOMEGA is as creative as it is horrifying.

BIOMEGA is mostly visual, and action scenes move the plot. There is zero characterization and very few scenes where the shooting stops, except when someone needs to explain something that inspires Zoichi and Nishu to go shoot at someone else. That's not bad by itself, but unfortunately, Nihei (the writer/artist) crams the manga with dozens of characters–most of whom look exactly alike–and several warring factions with difficult names or acronyms within very few pages. By the time we get to volume three, we have TOA under assault by the CEUs of the DRF, whose matriarch, Niarudi, is fighting

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against Genaral Narein of…some enemy or another, who has a woman working under him that looks just like a) Zoichi's mother and b) a woman killed at the beginning of volume 2, which means I'm not sure when she was introduced or what she's doing exactly, and they're all heading for the MSCF on J9O, and I think I'm developing a headache.

For me, coolness ultimately trumped confusion. I loved looking at the art, at the way Nihei made his world come alive with such inventive ideas and action scenes that really moved. I actually felt the excitement, a rarity for me in pure action stories, and that made it worth sticking with the convoluted narrative. If you're a fan of horror art, action stories. or post-apocalyptic sci-fi, it'll probably be worth it to you, too.