May 26, 2017
Noise is not a stand-alone work. It's the prequel to Blame and hints at the background for that manga (i.e. how that world came to be). It's <150 pages over six chapters, with two additional chapters separate from the main storyline. If you've read the author's other works, then you know what to expect.
The art isn't perfect. It's busy, sometimes unclear, and faces can be off. It's very different from the clean approach taken in most manga, but it works. This is a dirty, dark world (literally...I don't think the sun made an appearance), and the art matches. Two areas stand out in a good
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way though - the backgrounds and certain character designs. The author's put some solid work into depressing urban backgrounds and does some impressive things with the human figure. I'm always entertained seeing how he distorts people and corpses in unsettling ways.
The story is similarly a mixed bag. The author takes a minimal approach to storytelling - you don't get several pages of narration giving you the setting at the start. There isn't a ton of dialogue to clue you in either. Much of the dialogue is painfully simple in fact - no multi-page internal monologues here - and the focus is honestly not on the characters. You just explore using the characters as a vehicle, without relying on any troubled pasts or grand aspirations. Every piece that you see leaves more questions than it answers - the author doesn't even attempt to hit the 5 W's. I happen to enjoy this, but I also give a lot of leniency to shorter works so that they have more freedom.
I enjoyed Noise more than my overall score would indicate - it brings something different from most other manga - but it's definitely imperfect and I can't score it highly. As to whether you should read it, well, you shouldn't be looking at Noise without having read Blame first, and if you read Blame then you know how you feel about the author's style. If you insist on starting with Noise, the first chapter (<40 pages) gives a good sense of what Noise will be. Your questions probably won't be answered, but then again, there's only another 110 pages to get a slightly larger glimpse of this setting.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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