Daily Comic Book Mission #016: Ghost in the Shell

Welcome back to your daily comic book mission, nerds. 'Gather round because I’ve got a great one today. In fact, this is one of my all-time favorite books just in general, and I’m talking about the original Ghost in the Shell, before it was an incredible anime and then animated TV series and video games and a live-action movie that I think we’d all like to forget exists... it was a manga first published in 1991. And when you read it, what’s amazing is how close to the actual future Shirow Masamune predicted life would be. I mean, it’s crazy. At the time, it was just nuts, but now all this stuff is like a thing. Like, cyber hacking is everywhere. AI is, I mean, we’re all sick of hearing about AI by now, but Shirow Masamune saw the future of all of this, and like hacking eyeballs, hacking cars, hacking everything, and the general perverted nature of human beings and what they’ll do with cybernetics and artificial intelligence.

Shirow was quite, quite the futurist, and I was always a huge fan of his work going way back to the Appleseed days, which I think Appleseed was the first manga series I ever got into in the early nineties when I was in high school. And then of course I jumped on Ghost in the Shell. And I remember I stayed up all night reading my 1995 Dark Horse Comics edition that I’m holding in my hand right now. And when I got this in college, I couldn’t put it down. I read it from cover to cover. And just recently, I picked up the Ghost in the Shell Legacy Edition. And there’s a video on the website, on the ComicBook.beer website showing that. I wanted a hardcover version of the book. And there’s a couple differences.

I’ll mention those real quick here if you want to decide which version of the book you want to read. The original, well, not the original, the westernized, at least the American release here of Ghost in the Shell, is actually a really good release from Dark Horse, 1995. Page qualitie is actually really good for the era. Slight glossy pages, really high contrast artwork. The Legacy Edition, and the Dark Horse one, is a soft cover. You can also find that one probably for I would think for a decent price these days. I haven’t actually checked to be honest. I’m sure it’s in the library and you can find it digitally, no doubt.

The Legacy Edition has more of a matte, rougher, coarser paper stock, and the contrast isn’t as high. So you can see a little more detail in the artwork. The text, the English text, is smaller and the word balloons are smaller, so you get more artwork. They didn’t change a lot of the background details from the original Japanese. So there’s lot of subtitles telling you what signs are in the background, but we’re in, as in the Dark Horse version, they sort of English-ized whatever the signs in the background. And also the Legacy Edition is read from right to left, unlike the Dark Horse Edition which was read from left to right because back in those days, they weren’t publishing manga in the US in right-to-left format.

The anime blew me away, and I’ve seen it like a thousand times, so when I read the book, it’s like I can hear the actors’ voices in my head. And I never really cared for the Major’s voice, even though to this day it’s still what I hear when I’m reading the book. And then Batou was voiced by the amazing Richard Epcar, of course, who doesn’t love Batou? He’s the best.

And we get to meet Section Nine for the first time in Ghost in the Shell: Major Kusanagi, Batou, Aramaki, my man Ishikawa, Togusa, Boma, and the lovely Fuchikomas. And with the Legacy Edition, if it matters to you, you get a whole sticker sheet of Fuchikomas. Part of the reason I got the Legacy Edition was to get a hardcover, larger version of Ghost in the Shell 1.5. And then there’s also Ghost in the Shell 2: Man-Machine Interface, which if you’ve read that, it’s something. If Shirow could anthropomorphize a panty shot, he would have done that. He basically did do that, in between a thousand crotch shots. It’s really an interesting read that takes place mostly, almost entirely, in a virtual reality.

I guess I should point out that if you want to see the, at least early in the book, there’s some other differences in there, I think, but the one that definitely jumps out is in the Western version they omitted the early cyber orgy where Kusanagi is, well, she’s enjoying herself. And apparently, I think there’s some subtitles in this version which indicate that she’s also like a cyber drug dealer side or something.

If you’re really into this series and you have a couple bucks to spare, it’s expensive. I do like the Legacy Edition, but your mission is just to read whatever version of Ghost in the Shell you can get your hands on. Just go read the book. It’s really just incredible. It’s a long book. I mean, it’s a collection of, I assume, several smaller ones, but it’s got some color, got some black and white, and even the 1995 edition is perfectly serviceable to this day, even though yes, sorry, you do miss the very explicit cyber orgy earlier, which doesn’t really add a whole lot to the plot, but it does explain why Batou looks like he was just thrown through a meat grinder, which wasn’t entirely obvious because he jacks into her head while she’s... you know.

I have mixed opinions about the rest of the Ghost in the Shell series. I think some of it’s incredible, like the ’95 anime, Mamoru Oshii, one of my favorite anime directors, also did Jin-Roh, which is, if you haven’t seen Jin-Roh, go watch that immediately. It’s remarkable. And Stand Alone Complex was just terrific. It was actually a real treat to watch that for the first time, I guess 20 years ago by now. But it was like, wow. That’s really good. The animation was somewhat inconsistent, but for the most part, they really captured Ghost in the Shell. And also I really enjoyed the PlayStation games. I remember the first one came out, I was in school at the time, that was like ’98 or so for the PlayStation 1.

And there’s some, I think there’s some original animation sequences just for the game in that. It’s a really good game, the PlayStation 1 version. And then the Stand Alone Complex one on PlayStation 2 wasn’t too bad either. There might have been some other ones, but I don’t remember offhand.

So there you go. Ghost in the Shell, the story of Section 9 and The Puppet Master, a mysterious hacker who’s requesting political asylum because it’s gained sentient life or whatever. It’s really a fascinating read, a great science fiction action story, and you gotta give Shirow some credit for being so close. His vision of the future is in many ways so close to what actually happened that it’s eerie. There’s some things he missed, like the idiocy of social media, and how it’s turned everybody into a bunch of morons. But I think he did a pretty good job with AI and just how governments and the military and how politicians and unscrupulous billionaires would basically treat all this stuff. It’s really a fascinating read and a great action story at the same time with wonderful, memorable characters. So Ghost in the Shell is your daily comic book mission from ComicBook.Beer.

There’s even a scene where Kusanagi’s drinking early on. I don’t think she’s drinking beers though…

She was drinking beer on the boat in the movie though, right?

Hey, I just thought of something by the way. So at the end of the old Classic Game Room shows — like late in the era, the end of the Classic Game Room series I started to do something called MERG, where it was "Mark Enjoys Recommended Game". You know what I could do for the comic book show? "Mark Enjoys Recommended Comic", with the added bonus of, I mean, come on, you have to know by now, of being so close to Mark Hazzard MERC. And Ghost in the Shell is MERC. Merck enjoys recommended comic because MERM doesn’t… "Mark Enjoys Recommended Manga".... That doesn’t roll off the tongue as well. MERC… If it’s good enough for Mark Hazard, it’s good enough for you.