Blade Runner 2019 is a twelve-issue Titan Comics series written by Michael Green and Mike Johnson and drawn by Andres Guinaldo, published with Alcon Publishing from July 2019 to November 2020. Set in the Los Angeles of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, it followed the blade runner Aahna "Ash" Ashina as she searched for the missing wife and daughter of the billionaire Alexander Selwyn, a case that took her to the Off-World colonies and back.
The Story
Benny At Sunshine Botanics
In the first issue, set in 2019, the LAPD blade runner Ash followed a replicant named Benny through a crowded street market in Los Angeles. As she walked, she priced his body in her head, from the lungs and kidneys to the corneas she valued most. She cornered him inside Sunshine Botanics, a closed plant shop, and the fight that followed wrecked the greenhouse. Benny ended up on the floor with no feeling in his legs, and Ash admitted that she had not beaten him fairly.
Benny asked to be taken in, but Ash refused. He had killed five people, and she told him that her coroner contact liked to dissect replicants while they were still awake. She left him the knife on the floor as the other choice and added that his parts would go to collectors rather than to transplant buyers. Benny told her his real name was Benjamin, then gouged out his own eyes with the blade and died on the greenhouse floor, leaving Ash without the corneas she had meant to sell.
Alexander Selwyn's Missing Family
After calling in a pickup for the body, Ash met her superior Wojciech at a noodle bar, because she avoided the precinct office. Replicant cases had slowed down, so Wojciech gave her a missing persons job that had been requested from high up. Alexander Selwyn of the Canaan Corporation, a food company that had made trillions selling cheap nutrition to the poor, had lost his wife and four-year-old daughter the day before. Selwyn had asked for one of the department's best, and Wojciech reminded Ash that she had covered for her for years.
Ash flew her spinner to Santa Barbara, where the coast had been dug out and flooded to create island estates for the rich. In a vine-covered conservatory, Selwyn showed her an artificial lion cub made for his daughter Cleo and a photograph of Cleo with his wife Isobel. Isobel had taken Cleo to the birthday party of young Lydia Tyrell, and both had vanished after supper along with their chauffeur and bodyguard Arkady. Selwyn refused to make the case public, because he believed his enemies would use it to hurt him.
The Crash And Isobel's Escape
The Tyrell home and Isobel's old life as a couture model gave Ash nothing, so she went to her contacts in the slums. Street children led her to a crashed spinner near the river viaduct, where she found the Selwyn car and the body of Arkady. A pain in her spine dropped her to the ground, and she called Wojciech before flying home. There she took off her coat, revealing a mechanical implant along her back. Ash still owed money for the surgery, and the implant could be shut off remotely by the people who held that debt.
Earlier, Isobel had hurried through the rain with Cleo to meet a man who had promised to wait for them at a door marked 575. They arrived late and found the door shut. Three strangers offered help and then tried to take Cleo, but Isobel beat them off and threw one man through the windshield of a car. A man named Malak then stepped out of the rain, explaining that he had come looking for them, and the door opened just enough for mother and daughter to slip through.
The Skin Doctor's Shop
The second issue opened in Ash's childhood. As a girl, Ash learned from a medical scan that her spine did not work properly. Her mother held her hand at the doctor's office, cried, and left that same night. Her grandmother, whom Ash called Nani, told her that Mama had gone Off-World to make their lives better and send money home. Nani was too old to follow and Ash too young, because the colonies only wanted the wealthy and the healthy. Years later, walking through the crowds of Los Angeles, Ash said she had stopped being angry a long time ago.
Technicians recovered the data log from the wrecked Selwyn spinner, and its last call led Ash to the Aphrodite beauty salon, a cheap surgery shop. She picked the lock without a warrant and was caught inside by the owner, a surgeon who called himself Harlan Powell. He said a woman named Isobel had phoned for a consultation about a birthmark and then said she was going home. Ash left him her card, believed none of it, and paid a street boy to follow him when he left.
Isobel In The Tunnels
Malak led Isobel and Cleo down into tunnels under the city, explaining that the Skin had told him to bring them there. Below the streets was a market of people who could not afford to leave for the colonies. It was no safe harbor, because the police cleared the tunnels whenever replicants escaped. In a curtained tent, a woman in a green coat and goggles greeted Isobel by name, introduced herself as the Lung, and said the Skin had told her to expect them.
Isobel cut and dyed her hair blonde and dressed Cleo in plain clothes as a disguise, promising her daughter a new home far away. Soon afterward the Lung came back with bad news, because the police had found the Skin. He had not given them up, but she wanted to move them sooner and take them to the Bones, who would get them out of the city. She gave Isobel a pistol, and when Isobel thanked her for saving her child, the Lung said they were atoning.
Mr. Bellingham At The Carleton
The boy reported that the surgeon had gone to unit 7 of the Carleton, where Ash found an old man named Bellingham waiting for his dinner. Ash said she was unpopular with other blade runners because she did not trust the Voight-Kampff test. Bellingham admitted he was a replicant with seventeen months left, made to look old by the surgeon so he could stay hidden in the city. He called the Skin an artist and one of many who saw a better way.
When Ash asked about Isobel Selwyn, Bellingham said he knew everything and lunged at her throat. He knocked her blaster away and threw a knife, but Ash recovered the gun and shot him. Before he fell through the window, he told her to ask Alexander Selwyn why he wanted his daughter dead. Records showed that the surgeon had been Richard Slattery, a senior Tyrell bioengineer listed as dead for three years. Ash flew to find him, but another spinner opened fire and sent her car crashing through a skyscraper.
Shot Down Over Los Angeles
In the third issue, under fire, Ash steered her burning spinner through the freeways and streets she knew from childhood, remembering her Nani's saying that the city was like one big body. She brought the car down on a block that had been empty for a year and was thrown clear as it exploded. Limping away from the flames, she decided that if someone wanted her stopped this badly, nobody else would ever find the missing girl. Under a freeway, the man called the Bones told Isobel that her pursuer had been shot out of the sky.
The Bones explained that he, the Lung and the Skin had each been specialists in building parts of the body. He warned Isobel that her husband had hired a blade runner and that she would always be prey in the city, so she had to go south. Thirty hours later, Ash woke in a public hospital with a broken arm, and her superior Wojciech told her that the whole department now knew about her back brace. Ash had lost her badge, and Selwyn had asked for another detective, so the case went to Bryant.
The Tyrell Corporation's Offer
Discharged with a cheap arm brace, Ash took a cab to the Tyrell Corporation, where a receptionist already knew her name. A white-haired executive told her that the woman calling herself Isobel was a Nexus 7 replicant, a gift to Selwyn from Eldon Tyrell. The real Isobel had died of cancer the year before, and Cleo had been told that her mother came home after a short illness. Cleo carried a rare mutation of the FOXO3 gene linked to long life, and Tyrell believed the replicant had taken her to study it.
The executive confirmed that Richard Slattery had worked on the Nexus program before being dismissed. Tyrell offered Ash a large fee and a permanent cure for her spine, so that she would no longer need a brace or the lenders who powered it. Ash said she did not need to be fixed, but she accepted the job for Cleo's sake and was given a company spinner. Back at Bellingham's apartment, she found his drawings of a beach and decided the old replicant had believed he had a soul.
El Santuario
A young driver hid Isobel and Cleo in the back of a van and took them across the border, where she bribed the cartel guards with talk of Boss Fenix's favourite food. In Los Angeles, Ash listened in on police channels and heard her former partner Lelas calling in a replicant arrest at a nightclub. She knocked him out and questioned the replicant herself, offering to let him go if he talked. He told her of a place south of the border on a beach, which matched Bellingham's drawings of Baja.
On the coast, the driver brought Isobel and Cleo to a stone arch by the sea, where a boatman explained that the Heart would take them to the island. He rowed them across, and on the shore Isobel was welcomed to El Santuario. A group of replicants in simple clothes came out of the trees, and their leader told Isobel that she was safe among her own kind. Ash meanwhile flew the Tyrell spinner low over the waves to avoid the cartel boats, promising that she would reach Cleo soon enough.
Selwyn Visits The Skin
In the fourth issue, Alexander Selwyn broke into the Aphrodite salon with a bodyguard and confronted Richard Slattery, calling the surgeon's move from Tyrell to back-alley work a fall from grace. Slattery said he had already told everything to the blade runner, but Selwyn replied that she had proved of limited help. Selwyn wanted to know why his wife had called the Skin on the night she disappeared. He described himself as a man who grew things and said any threat to life filled him with dismay. Then he held a scalpel to Slattery's face and cut him.
Across the border, the replicant Isobel thought about the life Selwyn had given her. She had never thought about replicants before, because she believed she was human, and now their company was her only safe place. She meant to stay with them for whatever time she had left and make sure her daughter could be happy. On the beach of the sanctuary, she played with Cleo in the sand until Ash appeared, told the girl her name and said it was time to go home.
The Sanctuary In Mexico
The sanctuary's replicants surrounded Ash, and their goggled leader recognised her as the Butcher, the blade runner who sold replicant parts. Ash said she was no longer a blade runner and only wanted to bring Cleo home. The leader explained that the settlement had no weapons and lived on what the sea and earth provided, and he offered her a clue that could save Cleo. He showed her private correspondence between Eldon Tyrell and Alexander Selwyn.
In the letters, Selwyn had agreed to give the Tyrell Corporation custody of Cleo forever. In exchange, he received a Nexus prototype of his dead wife that could be replaced with newer models whenever the old ones wore out. Cleo's genome held a key to replicant longevity, and the experiments Tyrell planned would kill her. The leader added that the sanctuary was a laboratory of sorts, where Tyrell's runaway scientists tried to give their creations a peaceful end, but the warning came too late.
The Raid And Isobel's Stand
A Tyrell transport landed in a rainstorm, and armed soldiers poured into the village with Selwyn behind them. Selwyn demanded his daughter and called the replicants broken machines. When the soldiers opened fire, the replicants fought back with their bare hands, and many were killed, including the woman who had first welcomed Isobel. Isobel's thoughts drifted through memories of Cleo's childhood that had been implanted in her, which she held as real all the same.
Ash shot her way through the soldiers, and Isobel was wounded protecting Cleo. Isobel told Ash that she could save the girl, then stayed behind to hold off the soldiers while Ash flew Cleo away. Back in Los Angeles, with four hours left before her spine shut down, Ash swapped the Tyrell car for an old taxi and bought Cleo something to eat. She knew the police would only hand the girl to Tyrell, until Cleo said her mother had spoken of another place they could go.
The Ice Mines Off-World
The fifth issue jumped to 2026, after replicant production had been banned in 2022, as recorded on the Blade Runner timeline. The remaining Nexus 8 units served out their lifespans in the colonies, and one of them, a young miner named Padraic, kept a secret written record of his days. On an Off-World ice field, his crew drilled into ground full of geothermal activity. When a blast of molten rock killed one of the workers, Padraic noted that the others would not remember it and that nothing unusual would be logged.
After the shift, the replicant workers went through quarantine, ate in long rows and slept in crowded bunks aboard the mining ship Heidecker-Vostro. Padraic spent his free time writing in a battered notebook. Their routine was broken only by visits from a young trader called the Rabbit, who sold them small luxuries from the colony markets. The dredgers crowded around the Rabbit's crates, arguing over fruit, bottles and the price of their last deals.
Rabbit And The Dredgers
The Rabbit refused to deal with everyone at once and threatened to stop coming if the dredgers pushed too hard. When the trade was over, Padraic handed the Rabbit a glowing red stone he had found in the mine, asking only for a new pen in return. The Rabbit went home to a cramped cabin, where Ash, now using a wheelchair, waited for dinner. The Rabbit was really Cleo, eleven years old and disguised as a boy, and the two lived under false names while Ash worked as a shift supervisor known as Ms. Kady.
Cleo had started the game when she was four and had come to hate hiding. She told Ash she had heard about another skinjob fight that had killed the boss of Cythera Port, and that she was tired of living among fake names. Ash reminded her that the people her mother had begged Ash to protect her from were still out there looking for them. Later, Cleo met Padraic on a gantry above the ice, told him her real name and learned that he was not like the other replicants.
The Raid On The Heidecker-Vostro
When the Heidecker-Vostro sealed its locks for departure, armed raiders forced their way aboard with a captured crewman. Their leader, a man with a mohawk and a fur-collared coat, shot a guard and demanded the ship's codes. The raiders burst into the replicant quarters and announced that liberation had come, because the cargo they were collecting was the replicants themselves. On the bridge, the crew ran the failsafe and sealed every section, certain that the raiders would otherwise kill them all.
Ash begged them to open the door because Cleo was on the other side, but a crewman refused and could only apologise for her son. In the chaos, a dredger grabbed Cleo, and the raider leader shot him dead. The leader then turned his gun on the girl, but Padraic stepped in front of her, insisting that she was human, a child and his friend. The raider told him the rest of the crew was dead and that he could take the child if he wanted, and Cleo left the ship holding Padraic's hand with the freed replicants.
The Wreck Of The Heidecker-Vostro
The sixth issue opened in 2020, when a young Cleo asked Ash to read to her before bed. With no books in their cabin, Ash read from an Off-World advertising brochure that promised a new life on Arcadia, open to qualified settlers on a limited basis. Cleo fell asleep to its talk of pine forests and spring air, while Ash added under her breath that heaven was not the place she imagined. Years later, Cleo still carried the worn brochure with her.
In 2026, the Heidecker-Vostro lay broken and burning in the ice after the replicants had blown its core. A recovery crew picked through the bodies, complaining that the skinjob attacks were getting bolder, and found Ash still alive under the wreckage. As the crew lifted her out, a blonde woman in a long coat stepped through the debris and introduced herself as Hythe. She said the ship's crash had been a message from the replicants, and that Ash was going to help her send one back.
The Road To Ramanuja
Aboard the raiders' ship, Padraic watched over Cleo, still disguised as Rabbit, who had slept for twenty hours after the raid. Their leader Pellam summoned the child, needing transit ciphers so the stolen ship could pass as a resupply vessel. Cleo refused at first, and when Pellam reminded her that his crew had killed her mother, she answered that the dead woman was not her mother. She then told him that Heidecker-Vostro would be waiting on the quick route and that she still held a valid gate cipher for Ramanuja.
Cleo struck a bargain, offering the cipher in exchange for being dropped off wherever she wanted once they were through. Pellam warned her that his combat models were never as sharp as she was, but he accepted. Using her cipher, the raiders presented themselves to Ramanuja control as the cargo vessel Ardent in the Sun, and the gate let them pass. Afterward Padraic told Cleo he would go with her wherever she went, but she shut him out, telling him to stay with his own kind.
Hythe's Offer
In an office decorated with mounted stones, Hythe tested Ash with a vintage Voight-Kampff machine, saying eye tags were enough for Nexus 8 units but she preferred the old methods. Ash gave her name as Darja Kady, but Hythe read out her real record as Aahna Ashina, a former LAPD blade runner wanted for the 2019 murder of Isobel Selwyn and the abduction of Cleo. Ash denied ever killing anyone. Hythe said that even in London she had heard of Ash as the best runner who ever worked.
Hythe explained that she had found the child in the ship's manifest as Ian Kady and that the replicants now held Cleo. Since Ash would not help her for her own sake, Hythe asked her to do it for Cleo, and she offered a way to make Ash's broken back brace work again. Ash accepted, and the restored brace lit up along her spine as feeling returned to her legs. Wearing a coat and gloves loaned by Hythe, Ash stood on her own feet again and promised herself there would be no more running.
The Streets Of Ramanuja
The seventh issue followed Ash and Hythe to Ramanuja, a hub of a hundred trade routes and a haven for people looking to get lost or find their fortune. Ash took in the smells and noise of the market and reminded herself that she was not back home. Hythe preferred force to patience, and she slammed a fishmonger into a meat locker and choked him among the aquariums until he talked. Ash stopped her, warning that punishing the people they were meant to protect only made the next witness less likely to help.
The frightened fishmonger admitted that a crew matching their description had come through asking about eyes. The story then jumped back a week, to a bar where Pellam drank with his freed combat models while Cleo, still passing as Rabbit, stayed beside Padraic. When one of the raiders mocked Padraic as her boyfriend, Cleo said she was staying to see him through the eye work. The crew then visited a back-room surgeon, who cut the NX-8 serial tags out of their eyes while a Nexus 6 combat model screamed in the chair.
Cleo Seeks Arcadia
A week later, Ash and Hythe found the same surgeon and threatened her with life imprisonment for aiding fugitive replicants. She admitted that four of them had come with a skinny boy, and that one of the group was not a combat model and refused to have his eye done. Ash recognized the description of Cleo and Padraic, and the surgeon told them that the eyeball she had removed still carried its serial number. She also remembered one of the combat models mentioning the Maze, a lead she hoped would help them find the kid.
In the earlier timeline, Padraic told Cleo he was not like Pellam and that he wanted to see the life he had left at its fullest. Cleo said she still owed him for saving her, and that the debt would be paid when they reached their destination. A butler led them to the Hartawan, a robed broker who had long traded with the Rabbit from afar. Cleo showed him her worn brochure for Arcadia, and the Hartawan said it was not a dream easily made real, but he promised to make enquiries.
Pellam Falls In The Maze
The surgeon's lead took Ash and Hythe into the Maze, the Ramanuja borough where people went not to be found. Their prey had been there recently, though not with Cleo, and the windows of a shop exploded as Pellam attacked them. He said he had stayed behind so the others could escape, and that he had been built to hunt and did not like being hunted. Ash fired through the glass and his fur coat, and Pellam fell wounded, calling the future the humans had made already here.
Asked where the child was, Pellam said the kid was human and gone, and that the time of humans was up, before Hythe shot him dead. Ash complained that they could have learned more, but Hythe told her that she had been away too long and that blade runners no longer called it retirement but extermination. Hythe explained that she worked job to job for the corporations after the Blackout of 2022. Ash learned that her new employer was more personal, and a woman in a pink suit stepped out to greet her as an old acquaintance.
Isobel Returns
The eighth issue opened with Ash's memories of Los Angeles in 2000, when her mother had left for the Off-World colonies and her Nani promised they would one day follow and Ash would walk again. On Ramanuja station in 2026, Ash told the woman in the pink suit that she was a replicant. Hythe explained that she was an experimental model built by Tyrell in 2016 to replace the late wife of Alexander Selwyn, a gift from Eldon Tyrell paid for with Selwyn's daughter. The woman insisted she was the Isobel Ash had known.
Isobel said she had escaped and spent the years since looking for Cleo, and she proved it by recalling the last thing Ash had said to her. She admitted that she had left Cleo behind, and that it had been her husband's idea to hire Hythe, saying they needed an honest hunter. Ash noted that Selwyn wanted his daughter back, but Isobel assured her that Cleo would be safe at home now that Tyrell was dead. At the station's transit hall, Hythe reasoned that every ship to Earth passed through Ramanuja, and Selwyn had arranged a direct route to beat Cleo there.
Cleo Finds Her Mother
A week earlier, the Hartawan had told Cleo that Arcadia was a place of plenty only for those who already had it, and that the next transport would leave in one week. He warned that fugitives from a mining colony would not be welcomed into paradise and told Cleo to change her appearance, calling it a rebirth. Padraic helped her buy new clothes in the market and told her she no longer had to pretend to be a boy. When the posters for Arcadia filled the transit hall, Ash realized that she knew exactly where Cleo was going.
As the crowd boarded the transport, Ash spotted Cleo, now a red-haired girl in a pale jumpsuit, and Hythe drew her gun on Ash, claiming the Isobel she knew had died on that beach. Hythe's shot went wild when Padraic tackled her, and Cleo ran into Isobel's arms, calling her mama. Padraic recognized Ash as Ms. Kady from the mine and said Cleo had talked about her. Hythe told him he was not built for combat and shot him, and then she turned on Ash, sneering that she loved these machines.
Ash Comes Home
Before Hythe could fire again, Isobel shot her down. Isobel told Ash that she had not come to take Cleo home, and Cleo ran to Ash and held her tightly as a spinner lifted off nearby. Over Padraic's body, Cleo apologized to the replicant who had protected her. Isobel explained that she was a new model with the same memories of her daughter and of Ash, memories Tyrell had tried and failed to mold, and that she had only played the role her husband wanted.
Ash told Cleo to go with Isobel to Arcadia, where she would be safe, and when Cleo begged to stay, Ash said they could not keep hiding. Ash planned to make sure that Cleo's father never came after her again, even though a warrant was still out for her own arrest, and she admitted that she had never been safe. She returned to a rain-soaked Los Angeles, telling her Nani that she had seen the stars up close but belonged in the city. The arc ended with Ash back in the crowds she called home.
Ashina In 2000
The Free Comic Book Day issue, numbered #0, stepped back through Ash's past. It opened with a 1999 promotional film in which Eldon Tyrell, standing beside his owl Athena, promised that the first Nexus-series models would arrive in the new millennium. In Los Angeles in 2000, ten-year-old Aahna Ashina stood on crutches in her grandmother's Indian food truck beside a crowded park, eyeing a tray of cooling cookies. Her mother had left for the Off-World colonies to find work and was never heard from again.
Her grandmother, Nani, warned her that the cookies would burn her tongue, and then two police officers came to the counter for chicken biryani. When Nani asked them to pay, one officer told her the food was on the house, because the police had chosen not to notice that her permit was fake. After a police spinner roared over the truck, Ash said she did not like them. Nani told her that there was no liking or disliking, only those who watched from above and the people who did their bidding when they came down.
Doctor Zhang's Brace
A confidential Tyrell memorandum from July 2009 recorded Eldon Tyrell questioning project head Charles Edevane about a Nexus 4 pleasure model that had killed Lydia Kine, events tied to Blade Runner: Origins. The customer had already been sent a free replacement, and Tyrell called the new models his children. That same year, nineteen-year-old Ash visited the shop of Doctor Zhang, a backstreet cybernetics dealer who collected skulls bought on Avalon. She had finally saved enough money for the spinal brace he had built for her.
Zhang told Ash she would walk again, but she replied that she could already walk and that the brace would simply open doors she needed opened. When he tried to trade a discount for favors, Ash paid him with a bag of black-market cybernetics and a set of photographs she had found. Zhang threatened to have her killed, but Ash said she knew the same people he did and that they liked her better. An advertisement for the Nexus 6 then promised replicants designed to provide, built to persevere and determined to protect throughout the colonies.
Ash's First Retirement
In Los Angeles in 2013, Ash ran a Voight-Kampff test on a blonde office employee whose resume her employer had found inconsistent. The woman answered the question about a ewe trapped in birth by saying she would try to save the lamb, and protested when Ash stopped after only four questions. Ash said she had not needed any questions, calling the machine a prop for the inattentive. She had recognized the woman as a replicant on sight and drew her blaster.
The replicant asked whether Ash meant to kill her right there in the office, and Ash answered that retirement upon detection was her task and that the cleanup was someone else's job. The woman accused her of believing that replicants had no souls and asked what happened to Ash's own soul each time she did this. Ash said it was hard to say and then shot her, admitting afterward that she had been her first. The issue ended with Ash walking alone through the rain among the crowds.
Return To Los Angeles
The ninth issue began the final arc with Ash back in Los Angeles, where she visited her old superior Wojciech, now retired. Wojciech told her that she had never believed Ash was guilty, and Ash said that Cleo was safe but that Selwyn would never stop hunting her. Ash now wore a new brace with limited power, and she asked for help finding him. Wojciech said that Selwyn had gone hermit since the events of the case and agreed to dig into his whereabouts, while Ash learned that none of her old contacts would talk to her.
Ash dug out her old spinner, the one she said was where it all started, and flew across the city to the Tyrell Corporation headquarters. The great pyramid stood in ruins, a monument to progress turned to folly. After the death of Eldon Tyrell and the Blackout of 2022, the building had been abandoned, and, in Ash's words, the ghosts had moved in. She landed among the rubble and went inside to look for anything that could lead her to Selwyn.
The Ghosts Of Tyrell
Inside the ruin, a bald replicant ambushed Ash and a gang of feral replicants poured out of the darkness. She shot several of them, and one remarked that she smelled different. The brace saved her spine when she was thrown to the floor, though her legs began to tingle. A voice called her into a sealed lab, and she slipped inside as the mob shouted that they would bake and broil her, while a wild-haired man in a lab coat tapped in the codes that kept them out.
The man introduced himself as Fost, a Tyrell scientist who believed he still worked for Eldon Tyrell and called the building the garden and the soil. Ash lied that she knew Tyrell and Selwyn, and Fost revealed that he was working on the secret Isobel Project as one of Tyrell's chosen few. He led her to meet the rest of his team, a boardroom of unfinished replicants left rotting under plastic sheets, never delivered. Playing along, Ash told him that Selwyn needed his data right away.
Hythe Returns
Fost logged into the Tyrell network, which he called the Owl, a system that was difficult to catch and came and went at will. Ash hoped that the Isobel Project data would give her the thread she needed to pull. Far from the city, Alexander Selwyn waited in a modern house set on a forested mountainside, where he was told that Ash had returned. He was sure that she was coming for him, and his visitor answered that Ash could not find him even if she tried.
The visitor was Hythe, the hunter Ash had left behind on Ramanuja, now in a dark coat and gloves. Selwyn reminded her that Ash could find him and that she knew it, having met her before. He gave Hythe a new assignment and warned her that she had already died on Ramanuja once, telling her not to fail again. A framed family photograph of Selwyn, his wife and young Cleo stood on the desk between them, and the issue ended with the two of them preparing to move against Ash.
Fost's Lost Years
The tenth issue opened with the story of the Blackout of 2022, when Ash had been Off-World. New Nexus 8 models had been hunted not only by blade runners but by ordinary people who feared being replaced, and vigilantes went unpunished. Then a replicant attack shut down Los Angeles, destroyed the Tyrell Corporation servers and erased the records of who was artificial. With Eldon Tyrell dead, nobody was left to stop a ban on replicant production, and the great pyramid became a ruin where Ash now searched for answers.
In the lab, Fost showed Ash the names of everyone who had worked on the Isobel Project, and when she asked him what year it was, he answered 2022. Ash left him with his ghosts, hoping the names would lead her to Selwyn, but a police spinner ordered her down as soon as she took off. Suspecting that Wojciech had betrayed her, Ash ran rather than give herself up, flying low between the flare stacks of an industrial district. Her damaged engine gave out, and a squadron of police spinners boxed her in.
A Prisoner Again
At police headquarters, an officer showed Ash photographs of the Heart, the Lungs and the Bones, the former Tyrell scientists she had arrested back in 2019. He told her they were spending their pensions in lockdown, and he admitted that he had read her files and that she had been a hero in Mexico. When Ash asked where Alexander Selwyn was, he offered her freedom in exchange for Cleo's location. Then an old superior Ash called boss came to see her and told her that the world she knew was gone, along with Tyrell and replicant production.
The Resistance
The visitor said that Ash had never been close to Selwyn and never would be, and Ash replied that the betrayal had not been hers. Instead of a cell, she was sent in a police car to Ventura, a prison she had once filled herself. In a crowded street, the car slowed for traffic and a hooded man smashed the window, knocked out the officer and pulled Ash into the back of a van full of caged chickens. A boy in the van warned her to stay quiet, and the van drove out of the city to a lonely farmhouse.
The hooded man freed Ash from her cuffs and led her and the boy into a cellar beneath the house, apologizing for the surprise and explaining that Wojciech had given them a warning just in time. Below, a group of strangers waited for her, led by a tall woman in a vest. They knew who Ash was and that she had hunted their kind in the past, and they knew she was hunting Selwyn now. Their goals were aligned, they said, and they welcomed her to the Replicant Resistance.
The Hidden Ones
The eleventh issue opened with the replicants of the Resistance explaining how they lived unseen, cleaning, cooking and caring for the people of Los Angeles. Replicant labor was banned on Earth, but those with money still avoided work at all costs. Their leader Freysa said there were too few of them to overthrow anyone, and with production banned no more of their kind were coming. They helped replicants who escaped from the colonies live out their lives in peace, and they believed Ash could help them, though her damaged brace soon sent her to the floor in pain.
Freysa, a former combat medic who had served on Kalanthia and in the trenches of the Vigar takeover, recognized the brace as an expensive model built by Tyrell for the Alcazar Group. Ash admitted she had taken a hit the day before and let Freysa repair it. A quiet boy named Ephraim watched them work, and Freysa explained that he was not a replicant but a lost soul like the rest of them. Then Ash turned in pain as a shadow fell across the window, and the alarm went up that spinners had found the farm.
Hythe Strikes
Two spinners landed in the yard, and out of one stepped Hythe, whom Ash had seen die on Ramanuja. Hythe greeted her as if meeting her again for the first time and revealed that a member of the group named Pim had given away their location. She warned that ordnance was aimed at all of them and said that Ash would be coming with her while the rest stayed behind. Freysa cursed Pim, who said he was sorry, and Hythe thanked him with a bullet.
Moments later, the spinners opened fire and the farmhouse exploded. A replicant named Dyson fired a rocket launcher at the attackers and urged the others to take the remaining spinner, and Corso was hit as they ran. Ash, Freysa and Ephraim escaped in the stolen spinner, and Freysa set a course back to the city and their last bolthole. In the air, Freysa asked about Hythe, and Ash reasoned that the woman on Ramanuja or the one that night, or both, had been a replicant.
Welcome Back, Detective
On a rooftop in the city, Freysa finished repairing the brace while Ephraim slept, and she explained that the Resistance had freed Ash because they were also hunting Selwyn. After the Blackout, Selwyn's Canaan Corporation had taken over Tyrell's engineers and put them back to work, and he was secretly selling new Nexus models to the rich. Freysa warned that the new replicants were purely obedient, with none of the spark of her own kind. She sent Ash to Santa Barbara, where Selwyn had sold his old home years earlier to a company he still owned.
Ash flew alone over the archipelago and landed at the abandoned Selwyn house, which she found trapped in amber, no longer a home but a monument to a broken family. Inside, a lion stalked toward her, and Ash recognized the animal as one of Eldon Tyrell's last great achievements. Then Alexander Selwyn walked into the hall with four identical copies of Hythe beside him. He explained that Tyrell had dreamed of artificial life that grew and changed from cub to adult rather than dying young, and he welcomed Ash back to the house.
The Last Of Selwyn's Secrets
The twelfth and final issue opened with Selwyn boasting that he had known Eldon Tyrell better than anyone and that Tyrell's replicants had always been prototypes for a better humanity. His company had absorbed what was left of Tyrell after the Blackout and given his finest minds a new home. Ash asked whether there had ever been a real Hythe, and Selwyn said there had been and that the lion was proof of how far the work had come. He reminded Ash that they had made a contract that she had broken, and she answered by opening fire.
The Hythe replicants returned fire as Ash shot one of them and ran into the garden, where the lion cornered her among the vines. It clawed her back and tore into her brace, and she escaped from the house only by shooting her way down to the shore. On the beach, Selwyn and his Hythes caught up with her, and Selwyn revealed that it had been the first Hythe who gave Ash her new brace Off-World, a brace designed by his people that he could control. He shut it down, and Ash collapsed in the sand.
Hello, Father
Before Selwyn could finish, a spinner landed and Cleo, now a grown girl with red curls, stepped out with Isobel and greeted her father. Selwyn ordered the Hythes to lower their guns, and Cleo ran to Ash, saying that she could not go to Arcadia without knowing the truth. Cleo asked her father if he had promised her to Tyrell for his experiments, and he admitted it, saying that Tyrell had promised to save the world and give him back his wife. He swore he had regretted it every second since, and now that they were both home they could be a family again.
Isobel embraced him and told him that he had loved her too much and that she remembered their family, and then she snapped his neck. One of the Hythes executed another, and she told Ash that there was just one Hythe now, saying that Selwyn had built them to obey but that she had a flaw. Hythe wanted the house and to be forgotten by Ash and the people she ran with, and in return she would forget them too. She handed over the control for Ash's brace, restoring her legs, and left Ash and Cleo free to go.
Home Again
Back in Los Angeles, Ash shared a last meal of noodles with Cleo and Isobel at a crowded street counter in the rain. Cleo begged her to come to Arcadia, where it was safe, but Ash said she was not looking for safe and that she belonged in the city, where somebody had to look after it. Ash added that Nexus models were all around them and that she was not looking to retire any of them. She asked Cleo to send her a postcard anyway, and then she walked away into the crowds.
Later, in the Resistance bolthole, Ash turned the brace control over in her hands while Freysa told her she was going to break it, and she admitted that she needed it. That night, Ash held Ephraim as he slept and hoped she would never see Cleo again, because that was how she would know Cleo was safe. The city would not let her leave, she reflected, and it made her a promise of a new life that she accepted. The series ended with Ash at home in Los Angeles, and her story continued in Blade Runner 2029.
Main Characters
- Aahna "Ash" Ashina was a Los Angeles blade runner who depended on a spinal brace, gave up her badge to protect Cleo, raised her in hiding Off-World and finally stayed in Los Angeles with the Replicant Resistance.
- Cleo Selwyn was the daughter of Alexander Selwyn and the carrier of a rare mutation, who grew up disguised as the trader Rabbit and left for Arcadia with Isobel.
- Isobel Selwyn was a replicant made in the image of Alexander's late wife, who escaped him, found Cleo again on Ramanuja and killed her husband at the end of the series.
- Alexander Selwyn was the head of the Canaan Corporation, who traded his daughter to Tyrell, took over Tyrell's engineers after the Blackout and built an army of Hythe replicants.
- Hythe was the hunter Selwyn sent after Ash and Cleo, revealed to be a line of replicant copies, the last of which turned on the others and let Ash go.
- Wojciech was Ash's superior in the department, who gave her the Selwyn case and, after retiring, warned the Resistance in time to free her.
- Padraic was a Nexus 8 miner Off-World who kept a written record of his life and protected Cleo until Hythe shot him on Ramanuja.
- Fost was a Tyrell scientist still living in the ruined headquarters, who believed it was 2022 and gave Ash the names behind the Isobel Project.
- Freysa was a former combat medic and a leader of the Replicant Resistance, who repaired Ash's brace and pointed her toward Selwyn's old house.
- Ephraim was a quiet human boy sheltered by the Resistance, who ended the series in Ash's care.
Behind The Scenes
Michael Green, co-writer of the Blade Runner 2049 screenplay, created the series with Mike Johnson, and Andres Guinaldo drew all twelve issues, with Marco Lesko on colors, Jim Campbell on lettering and David Leach as editor. Green and Johnson shared the writing on the early issues, and the final arc credited Johnson as writer and Green as creative consultant. The first four issues ran from 17 July to 9 October 2019 and were collected as Los Angeles, and issues 5 to 8 followed from December 2019 to July 2020 as the Off-World volume.
A Free Comic Book Day issue numbered #0 went on sale on 12 August 2020, between issues 8 and 9, and looked back at Ash's early years. The final arc ran from issue 9 on 29 August 2020 to issue 12 on 18 November 2020 and was collected as Home Again, Home Again in February 2021, which also reprinted the special. Each issue carried several covers, with work by Syd Mead, Rian Hughes, John McCrea and Fernando Dagnino among others, and the special was dedicated to Mead. The last page promised that Ash's story would continue in Blade Runner 2029.
Closing Thoughts
Blade Runner 2019 was Titan's first Blade Runner comic series and the first to tell an original story set in the world of the films. It followed Ash from a missing persons case in Los Angeles to the mining colonies and back over twelve issues and a special, as she gave up her badge to protect the child at the center of the Selwyn case. Along the way it showed the world after Tyrell's death and the Blackout, the replicants hiding among humans, and a heroine who ended the series not as a hunter but as a protector of the people she once retired.
External Sources
Tag Categories: Blade Runner Lore | Blade Runner Comics
