What i found disappointing about the book was its reliance on fan service as a selling point. There are some great ideas explored in this book, and the writing is great. Really the only merit I saw in it was in elements of it that were drawn on for the anime. Overall I don't think I'd recommend this to anybody. I'm used to some from Shirow, but the majority of the book was Motoko floating around nude or running around in various bodies flashing her underwear in awkward action shots.

Plus there was a ridiculous amount of fanservice everywhere. He also randomly switches between color and black & white, sometimes right in the middle of the page. It's jarring and most of the 3-d looks bad. Shirow seems to be using some weird combination of more 3-d realistic looking art and flat anime art and it just doesn't work well. Most of this could have been cut and the story might have seemed a bit more cohesive. Motoko (not the same as the original) spends most of the story floating around nude in cyperspace while ordering her ridiculous looking AI assistants to put out decoys and toy bombs and other techno jargon nonsense. Most of it gets lost completely in all the technobabble (complete with rambling footnotes) and most of the time I had no idea what was going on. I love Ghost in the Shell and I usually love Shirow's art, but this book was pretty terrible. The majority of this manga is, to put it bluntly, complete and utter crap. I really hate to give such a low rating to anything Ghost in the Shell, but this really deserved it. Two more volumes of Appleseed followed before he began work on Ghost in the Shell. After a professional reprint of Black Magic and a second volume of Appleseed, he released Dominion in 1986. The story was a sensation, and won the 1986 Seiun Award for Best Manga. The result was Appleseed, a full volume of densely-plotted drama taking place in an ambiguous future. His work caught the eye of Seishinsha President Harumichi Aoki, who offered to publish him. While in college, he developed an interest in manga, which led him to create his own complete work, Black Magic, which was published in the manga fanzine Atlas. Shirow is also known for creating erotic art.īorn in the Hyōgo Prefecture capital city of Kobe, he studied oil painting at Osaka University of Arts. He is best known for the manga Ghost in the Shell, which has since been turned into two theatrical anime movies, two anime TV series, an anime TV movie, and several video games. Masamune Shirow ( 士郎正宗) is an internationally renowned manga artist.

The ghost in the shell deluxe