Black Magic

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The art is absolutely wonderful and overall, I enjoyed the book. Spoiler section clearly outlined.

I read other reviews that this was hard to follow, and while correct it isn't to the level that it is impossible to follow. The paneling itself is remarkably easy to digest, there is no difficulty in being able to follow the flow of events and nothing feels "jumpy" between action sequences.

The majority of the hard areas to follow is in how the story unfolds as well as the introduction of new characters. The story feels like 50% of a full story, where you are reading maybe every other chapter ... of a longer manga. You still get the start and end though. You have to piece together events that played out between the chapters, though it is easy enough to determine what the conclusion of events was based on in-world dialogue and situations.

The second is the introduction of characters, which has a very "flow-like" style. It will follow from one event from the previous story tangentially to the next event. To use an example, two people end up on a highway due to the events of our protagonist. A car narrowly avoids them by swerving. The story then takes us to the driver of the car and introduces those characters - leaving behind the protagonist and the previous story. All the characters end up melding together into one homogeneous story, but the way it can hook onto a new character and dive into them for a chapter can be jarring.

With those two understood, I still think the story was overall fun. It touched on humanity, aliens, etc. It had an ending of sorts - more so than a random anthology would. There is humor imbedded throughout the manga based on some character references as well as interactions. I don't quite get the other reviews where they say the stories are random - they all certainly tie together.

Anyway, I recommend the book so long as you know the unique structure of the story and character introductions going into it.

SPOILER ALERT
For those who cannot seem to understand the story, here is how it all links together:

Humanity on Venus ruled by computer, Nemesis. -> Humanity transitions to being ruled unfairly by Zeus (robot). -> Nemesis creates Duna Typhon to guard humanity (all humanoids) against Zeus -> Zeus tries to kill Typhon -> Battle almost results in the crash of Duna Typhon's friends, the staff of the "Onimal" restaurant -> Luna is given sword by Nemsis and "activated" -> Zeus sends robots to kill Duna and Friends who escape -> We go to a secondary story about Zeus trying to setup a colony on Earth -> Nemsis had setup an artificial sun to heat the earth up for new colonization -> Zeus sends an undercover agent to blow up the artifical sun and stops mammals from developing -> this kills most life on earth but we learn not all of it (start of our ice age) -> [Inferred] Zeus does not want Humanity to expand and is working against them -> Introduced to new characters + gag chapter -> We go to a new story and there are "rogue" robots on the loose trying to be stopped -> [Inferred] Zeus has released these robots to kill humans -> Luna learns about this and goes to stop them -> We follow some human spec-ops who are able to take out a few, but it shows the superiority of robots to humanity -> New robot model under control of humans is launched to try and stop old robots, Luna sees the danger in this new model and alters events to show humanity's danger of relying on robots tos olve their issue, the new model escapes into the city. -> Humans stop the new model with much difficulty, discussing more philosophical concepts about humanity versus robots and user versus tool -> [Inferred] Zeus is looking for more ways to stop humanity's spread and testing concepts -> Zeus sets up a program to ship humanity off Venus to new colonies -> Plot is discovered by Luna and staff of "Onimal", they foil the plot with the help of the Captain and save the ship -> Ship returns to Venus to spread the news of Zeus's betrayal of humanity -> Zeus is overthrown and humans take over as leaders of humanity, with Nemesis as an advisor -> Duna Typhon leaves guardian of humanity leaves -> Epilogue tells us a Bioroid War of Liberation breaks out and kills both humanity and robots on Venus, turning it into how we see Venus today.

So pretty standard ending, it wraps up the story, we have our main protagonist traveling the stars (to maybe return if the author wanted a new story), but Venus is destroyed. Was it Zeus who came back? Was it Nemesis? Luckily guessing is part of the fun.

I'd heard that the story was damn near incomprehensible, and whoever wrote that was right. It jumps all over the place, and it’s pretty hard to follow. It's not that the writing is difficult to understand, the story just literally doesn't make sense. If you consider it to be more of a collection of random short stories set in the same universe, it seems to make it more understandable. Since it was his first work, though, I'll cut him some slack.

The art isn't Shirow's best, and the detailed backgrounds you come to expect from him are nowhere to be found. There was even one ... panel where a guy was missing an eye for no apparent reason.

The characters never really get a back-story, though I'm assuming that they're supposed to be like gods almost. It's really hard to tell.

Overall, I had fun with this piece, but I can't really recommend it.

This is Masamune Shirow's first work, and as you might expect, it's far from his best. It's a series of semi-connected short stories that are supposed to take place within the same universe, with a set of shared characters that pop up from time to time. The setting is a weird mix of semi-hard and really soft science fiction, with some very badly defined magic/ESP thrown in to confuse things.

The overall plot is basically incomprehensible. There is a prelude and and epilogue that try to bookend the series, but they have no obvious connection to the rest of the story. And the epilogue really ... doesn't make sense even on it's own terms.

The best story by far is the one where special forces soldiers take on some androids. Boiled down and with the magic element stripped out, it would go on to become the fun little anime OVA of the same name.

The only reason I'd recommend reading this is as manga history. You can see the elements that would be put to better use in Appleseed and Ghost in the Shell, and get an idea of how Shirow's concepts evolved over time.