Koukaku Kidoutai: The Ghost in the Shell
The Ghost in the Shell

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I bought GitS over this last summer. I had already been such a huge fan of the movies and the series, I was eager to see where it all began. I had never read through a Shirow manga, with the exception of bits of Appleseed. When I got home, it was damn near 3 in the morning, and I still ended up getting to sleep at like 5.

Why?

Because this book is frickin amazing. I'm shocked at how few people have actually picked it up, given the near fanaticism the show inspired. One of the main reasons this might have happened is because there are some ... extremely graphic things that happen in the manga. Given that Shirow also dabbles in drawing hentai, I can expect this now, but I was a little unnerved when I first read it. Don't worry about it, because it only really lasts like 3 pages and if you read the massive amounts of extra information in the back it makes sense.

The art in this is beautiful and brutal at times. Shirow is an absolute master at creating realistic and detailed backgrounds. His city scapes and his mechanical designs seem as though they could actually work in real life. You can certainly tell that this was done in the early 90s though,if only because of some of the inking styles and color portions of this book practically scream it.

The characters, I'll admit, aren't exactly as fleshed out as they become in the show. However, they did lay the groundwork. Togusa is still a father and husband, Batou is still the smart ass, and Motoko is still cold and efficient. One of the things that fans of the series will notice is a lack of Tachikomas. Their predecessors, the Fuchikomas are essentially the same thing, except with noticeably different mech designs.

The story is mostly random crimes and special ops that the Section 9 crew goes through, making this seem like a cop story first and foremost. Eventually it gets to the Puppeteer, and fans of the movies already know how that turns out. Some twists and turns in the story make it more enjoyable (at least to me) than the movie that was based off this, and some of the more sci-fi stuff does get explained in greater detail. Again, this is where that directory in the back comes in handy. Without reading it, this story will probably not make sense unless you're a scientist, military specialist, or an extremely well read religious practitioner.

My enjoyment of this manga is obvious, and overall I think that any fan of the series, movies, or scifi and cyberpunk in general should check it out.

I must say that my first interaction with the universe of GitS was the 1995 film. So when I first started reading this I was put off by how much of a different character the major was. The whole book is much more light-hearted than the film.

For the most part it is more of an episodic work. We start in-media-res and the feeling of that only really goes away at the end as we go through snippets of life in section 9 and in this sci-fi future. You don't really get to understand all the context, and there's some small (author or translator's?) notes explaining ... things throughout the whole work which help a lot, but ultimately you don't really need to know everything about the universe. Eventually I reached a middle point where the brand/model number gibberish is scarce enough that stopped feeling bad for filtering it out.
As I said this is more of an episodic work, with only the latter chapters making up a longer narrative. Due to this you could say the writing matures throughout the book, as you go from small chapters with things like that lesbian scene on the boat (with the most contrasting dialogue ever) to longer chapters about finding out who the bad guys are amidst all the politics.

The art-style isn't one of my favourites but it was fitting and worked out for both machinery and people.
As far as panelling goes, I had a lot of trouble figuring out what happened in close-quarters action scenes. Who came from where and what are they doing? Sometimes it felt like we were missing a panel in the middle, or would benefit from seeing the thoughts of a character.
The colour choices, giving some pages a colourful oily look, and mostly dabbing on dark tones with strong contrast of cold and warm colours were really good though. Really gives the vibe of big artificial polluted city.

Damn, I feel like I've read something else than people. This title is overrated af, it's basically the first GITS, this legendary BEST cyberpunk manga ever. No, it's not. It's just a 300 page compilation of 11 chapters with story like "oh, there's a new bad guy and we have to beat him cuz he bad!!". The very first pages of this manga really got me, it started from a nice action scene, but... at first sight I couldn't even tell what's going on in the panels. Art in GITS is just... bad. It's not a "masterpiece art whatever" like everyone says. It's awfuly drawn ... comic with definitely TOO many things. On almost every page author writes long summaries to everything that is in the story only because he didn't just include it in the main plot and described everything slowly. He rushed the story from start to finish and in the end you don't even know what you've just read because there is just too much informations that are distracting you from the manga and story alone is that boring so you may forgot what you're reading and get yourself lost. As I said earlier, there's literally no story, just a compilation of random actions that lead you to a lesbian cyborgs' sex scenes with Motoko in the main role. Another thing - characters, there's also too many of them and in the end only 2-3 are getting enough attention to maybe at least remember their names. I honestly didn't enjoy it, I'll prolly watch the movie too and compare those 2, but damn, I was reading a 300-pages manga for almost a year only because it's so freakin boring and repetitive. I don't recommend it to anyone honestly, there are much better things in the bag. Try Akira, Gunnm or Blame if you wanna see what the real cyberpunk is. I hope this review will help some people considering to read GITS. Overall, it's just a poor manga with ugly artstyle, forced useless sex scenes, badly written characters in 90% of their appearances and literally no single straight story, plus author maybe didn't have any idea for the storyboard so half of the manga is a novel describing every electrical device that he invented, in the most boring way in the world, and there's just TOO MUCH of it.