Blade Runner Tokyo Nexus #1 Review

 

Writer: Kianna Shore

Artist: Mariano Taibo

Colorist: Marco Lesko

Letterer: Jim Campbell

Editor: David Leach

Creative Consultant: Mellow Brown

Cover Artists: Christian Ward; Andy Belanger; Mariano Taibo & Marco Lesko; Fernando Dagnino; Paul Pope & Lovern Kindzierski; Blank;

Publisher: Titan Comics

Price: $3.99

Release Date: July 31, 2024

 

Stix was supposed to meet Mead in a poor Tokyo district. But he is late, forcing her to confront a protection racket alone. When a gang member flashes a gun, Mead gets a meat cleaver in her leg. Can Mead still trust her replicant partner with her life? Or is her partnership with Stix on the rocks? Let’s leap into Blade Runner Tokyo Nexus #1 and find out!

 

Story

Thankfully, Stix arrives in the nick of time. But Mead is unhappy. After she gets patched up, she lets him know that his commitment to their partnership is fading. His response? When a job offer materializes, Stix walks, forcing Mead to investigate alone.

 

Sayo may be naïve about her family’s business in Blade Runner Tokyo Nexus #1. Or is she pretending she doesn't know her family is involved with the Yakuza? Either way, it's a dangerous situation to enter alone. But the girl's concern seems genuine, so Mead agrees to investigate the disappearance. While she seeks out the missing woman, Stix helps his friends. Like many private detectives, their activities often take them into poorer communities. But in Stix’s case, he spends more time among the illegal replicants: the synthetic people who fought for Humans yet were banned from Earth.

 

While Mead and Stix's partnership slowly fractures, a new organization threatens Tyrell's dominance in manufacturing Replicants. In Kianna Shore's story, a group of former Tyrell employees have founded Cheshire. It's not a company that operates in the open. Nor are its business practices ethical. The scientists view Replicants as their creations, to be altered or destroyed in the name of efficiency and productivity. Worse, the Replicants the scientists build are improvements based on Tyrell’s designs. And Tyrell made Replicants to go to war.

 

Blade Runner Tokyo Nexus #1 fills a gap in franchise history between Blade Runner Origins and Blade Runner 2019. Like all the Blade Runner stories, it’s a tale of race and class warfare that questions the definition of what it means to be Human. The story asks if partnerships like that of Ash and Freysa or Deckard and Rachael are inevitably doomed. In a world of inclusivity, it tests our willingness to look past external differences, discard labels, and accept all people as equals. The debut issue tackles PTSD among veterans and asks if we are capable of evolving. In an age when people employ gaslighting and guilt to achieve desired results, Kianna Shore ponders what makes Humans so superior.

 

Art

Mariano Taibo’s tall, graceful buildings display an elegance not found on the streets. Those well-off wander grass and tree-lined sidewalks.

Crime and inadequate medical care ravage the malnourished poor. Business-like Mead and Styx stand out among the street thugs and civilians in casual attire. But their trench coats hide more than business suits.

 

Marco Lesko heightens a street fight by contrasting green with orange and red in Blade Runner Tokyo Nexus #1. As a chef prepares sushi for anxious patrons like Stix, yellow surrounds Mead’s glass as she downs her green drink and returns it to the counter. The glass reflects a partial silhouette of her partner’s demolished jubilance. As the partners sit beneath a yellow display and brown banners, perhaps the orange tinge coloring Sayo reminds Stix of the blood he recently spilled.

 

As Mead and Sayo converse and visit Miyuki’s apartment, Jim Campbell fills dialogue white balloons with black uppercase letters and shares Mead and Stix's lowercase musings in colored narrative boxes. The words rarely embolden for emphasis and never enlarge. Giant letters emphasize the enhanced abilities Stix hides in public and announce a police spinner descending to apprehend a troublemaker in riot-ravaged Tokyo. Thanks to Titan Comics for providing a copy for review.

 

Final Thoughts

As two Private Detectives, one Human and the other a Replicant, get drawn into a brewing war involving the Yakuza, Tyrell, and a new supplier of bootleg Replicants in the poor neighborhoods of Japan in Blade Runner Tokyo Nexus #1, a still figure on a green slab asks, "What are little girls made of?"

 

Rating 9/10

 

For more cover art see my review at Comic Book Dispatch.