Potential double-dippers: move along, nothing to see here. First-time readers: this edition is as good as any to give Shirow's flawed cyberpunk classic a spin.
Creative Staff
Writer/Artist: Masamune Shirow
Translation: Frederick L. Schodt and Toren Smith
Adaptation: Frederick L. Schodt and Toren Smith
What They Say
Deep into the twenty-first century, the line between man and machine has been inexorably blurred as humans rely on the enhancement of mechanical implants and robots are upgraded with human tissue. In this rapidly converging landscape, cyborg superagent Major Motoko Kusanagi is charged to track down the craftiest and most dangerous terrorists and cybercriminals, including "ghost hackers" who are capable of exploiting the human/machine interface and reprogramming humans to become puppets to carry out the hackers' criminal ends. When Major Kusanagi tracks the cybertrail of one such master hacker, the Puppeteer, her quest leads her into a world beyond information and technology where the very nature of consciousness and the human soul are turned upside down.
From Shirow Masamune, the award-winning creator of Appleseed and Dominion, comes The Ghost in the Shell, the breakthrough manga that inspired the internationally acclaimed animated film. An epic dystopian tale of politics, technology, and metaphysics, The Ghost in the Shell has been hailed worldwide as an unparalleled visionary work of graphic fiction. And now it's ready to dazzle the imagination in its second millennium.
This edition includes a new Introduction from Dark Horse publisher Mike Richardson, and a fascinating Postscript from author Shirow Masamune, with his thoughts on the phenomenon that is The Ghost in the Shell!
The Review!
Technical:
Prior to Kodansha's reissue, (The) Ghost in the Shell was released domestically in two fairly different editions from Dark Horse. Dark Horse's oversized first edition -- the one I'm most familiar with -- was originally issued in 1996 around the time of the first Ghost in the Shell film; as was common with many contemporary American manga releases, it was released with a "flipped" left-to-right page layout and a two-page sex scene edited out. A second edition in 2004 restored the original right-to-left layout and the censored pages; unfortunately, Dark Horse also euphemistically restored the pages to their "original Japanese size", which shrunk both the height and the width by about an inch.
It's a mixed blessing, then, that Kodansha's new edition is almost indistinguishable from the first Dark Horse edition. I happen to have that edition on hand, and comparing the two, it's hard to find any significant differences between them: Kodansha's new version curiously affixes "The" to the title, increases the font size of the endnotes, and drops Dark Horse's cover art gallery, but is otherwise a virtual carbon copy of the Dark Horse version. On the one hand, Shirow's artwork practically begs for the oversized page format that Kodansha has generously brought back; I'm also relieved that Kodansha has decided not to touch Schodt's and Smith's translation work, which reads remarkably smoothly considering the often-bewildering source material. On the other hand, Kodansha missed a golden opportunity to give fans a reason to double-dip by combining the first version's oversized footprint with the second version's unedited, uncut format. (To add insult to injury, Shirow's copious editorial notes seem to have been taken from the wrong edition: two notes in Kodansha's release refer to the redacted sex scene, and the subsequent endnotes often point to the wrong page numbers.)
My recommendation? If you don't already own one version or another of Ghost in the Shell, the flipped artwork and one edit that's inconsequential to the plot (both of which were reportedly done with Shirow's blessing) probably aren't going to have a major detrimental effect on your enjoyment of the material. Flipped or unflipped, Shirow's artwork is truly top-notch: the amount of detail, particularly in the color artwork, is breathtaking -- especially when he's dealing with his pet topics of futuristic technology, high-powered weapons, and women wearing impractical outfits. The print quality is also excellent, with sharp, high-contrast lineart accompanying the vibrant non-glossy color pages. The "C" grade for packaging is more out of the squandered potential (and the botched references in the backmatter) than out of a major packaging screw-up; Kodansha could have made a big splash by making its North American debut with a definitive edition of a much-beloved title, but instead fans will have to "make do" with a warmed-over version of an admittedly pretty-good release from almost 15 years ago.
Contents (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
At this point, trying to review The Ghost in the Shell a decade-and-a-half after the fact is almost like trying to review mid-to-late-90s American anime fandom itself. It's not just that Oshii's feature film adaptation was a resounding commercial success, famously becoming the first anime film to reach the #1 spot on Billboard's VHS sales charts and a de facto rite of passage for new anime viewers; it's also how well it captured the zeitgeist of what a whole generation of fans were "into" at the time -- gritty cyberpunk settings, gratuitous violence, and female characters who wouldn't have gotten carded when trying to buy cigarettes. In fact, I'd be surprised if many people reading this review weren't at least vaguely familiar with some part of the franchise, having spun off a sequel manga series, two seasons of TV anime, three feature films, two video games, and several novels since the manga's completion in 1991.
For the benefit of the uninitiated, The Ghost in the Shell is an episodic science fiction series set in a dystopian future where most everyone (at least among those with the financial means) has received nanomachine enhancements ranging from brain-computer interfaces to full cyborg conversions. The narrative focuses on Major Motoko Kusanagi, a full-cyborg member of Japan's Section 9 anti-terrorist unit whose hacking skills and short temper command both respect and fear from her compatriots in Section 9. Each chapter follows Section 9's investigation into a different terrorist incident, often at odds with other governments or other sections of Japan's own government, and each is generally self-contained (with a notable exception that I'll go into a bit below).
The semi-formulaic concept notwithstanding, one of the reasons The Ghost in the Shell "clicked" with contemporary audiences was that it became a sort of transition work for author/artist Shirow Masamune, who's infamous for filling his series to the brim with meticulous mechanical designs, female leads in skimpy outfits, and (especially recently) borderline-incoherent political/pseudo-scientific rants. The Ghost in the Shell is his first work where the latter plays a significant part of the plot, and probably the last where it doesn't completely subsume everything else in the story; the universe he's created here is packed with loving detail, down to the socio-political ramifications of cyberspace expounded upon in the main story as well as in Shirow's copious editorial notes. This is a series that sets aside an entire chapter to explain how cyborg bodies are put together -- not because it's particularly relevant to the story, but because Shirow can.
At first, his atmospheric details just contributes some nice touches to what're essentially action-oriented detective stories: Kusanagi and her coworker Togusa engage in a high-speed car chase and shootout with a would-be assassin, who turns out to be a victim of memory manipulation; fellow Section 9 member Batou discovers a sex slave ring by way of malfunctioning androids; the entire team unravels a Soviet political scandal with the aid of sentient tanks, optical camouflage, and computer hacking. As the series progresses, the cyberpunk and political in-fighting elements of the series start dominating the story, and Shirow becomes frustratingly hesitant to explain what's going on in any useful way. The series hits a pivotal transition at Chapter 9, taking on a drastic shift in style -- amidst a deep political conspiracy, Kusanagi spends the better part of the chapter directly hooked into a sentient AI named The Puppeteer who speaks mostly of the Self and quantum physics before apparently vanishing into cyberspace. Shirow subsequently calls back to this event throughout the rest of the manga, a multi-part storyline where Kusanagi is placed on trial after botching a Section 9 operation. Not only are the political conspiracies in this arc nearly impossible to unravel -- they involve multiple nations, not to mention rival factions of the Japanese government -- but I defy any reader to make sense of the scene where Kusanagi is reunited with the "ghost" of the Puppeteer, whose description of the human condition reads vaguely like a quantum physics lecture after being passed through the mental filter of a schizophrenic. It's anybody's guess if even Shirow himself understands what he's going on about; if he does, he sure ain't telling.
The strangest part is that, somehow, all of this just works: in spite of (of maybe because of) Shirow's progressively convoluted world view, The Ghost in the Shell is a remarkably entertaining read. Maybe it's the chemistry among Section 9's members; maybe it's the atmosphere; maybe it's the clever storytelling leading up to the Puppeteer incident ... one, or some combination, of these things really clicked with me. Plus, it's hard to dislike the sheer spectacle of witnessing a manga author trying to cram computer networks into the Tree of Life mythos with what seems to be a completely straight face.
In Summary:
Like a lot of Shirow's later works, The Ghost in the Shell demands a lot out of the reader, both good and bad: patience, the willingness to unravel convoluted plot threads, and the ability to recognize when to just move past some belabored plot point and accept that Shirow probably has no idea what he's talking about. Fans of Oshii's movie adaptation shouldn't have much trouble with this (and, with the exception of the pseudo-scientific quantum physics nonsense unique to Shirow's version, have probably seen worse); people coming in from the Stand Alone Complex TV series will probably have a tougher adjustment, especially once Shirow goes off the deep end with the Puppeteer plot thread. Nevertheless, readers who know what they're getting into will probably get a lot of entertainment value out of Shirow's glorious mess -- hell, at the right price, some readers will probably want to pick it up just as an artbook.
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