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New Blame! Manga Adapting Upcoming Film Debuts on April 26

This year's April issue of Kodansha's Shonen Sirius magazine announced on Saturday that the manga adaptation of the upcoming new Blame! film will launch in the June issue of Shonen Sirius on April 26. Artist Kōtarō Sekine (Ninja Slayer Kills) is drawing the manga.

The new anime film (pictured at right) is inspired by Tsutomu Nihei's original Blame! manga. The film will open on May 20 for a limited two-week engagement in Japan, and it will also begin streaming exclusively on Netflix worldwide on the same day.

The film's official site describes the all-new story:

In the distant technological future, civilization has reached its ultimate Net-based form. An "infection" in the past caused the automated systems to spiral out of order, resulting in a multi-leveled city structure that replicates itself infinitely in all directions. Now humanity has lost access to the city's controls, and is hunted down and purged by the defense system known as the Safeguard. In a tiny corner of the city, a little enclave known as the Electro-Fishers is facing eventual extinction, trapped between the threat of the Safeguard and dwindling food supplies. A girl named Zuru goes on a journey to find food for her village, only to inadvertently cause doom when an observation tower senses her and summons a Safeguard pack to eliminate the threat. With her companions dead and all escape routes blocked, the only thing that can save her now is the sudden arrival of Killy The Wanderer, on his quest for the Net Terminal Genes, the key to restoring order to the world.

Nihei launched the science-fiction action story Blame! as his first manga series in Kodansha's Monthly Afternoon magazine in 1997, and ended it in 2003. Tokyopop published the 10-volume manga in North America. Kodansha published a new "master's edition" of the manga in Japan in 2015 that had six volumes. Vertical is releasing this new version of the manga in English, and it shipped the second volume in December.