The Ghost in the Shell Stands Alone as a Classic Sci-Fi Manga

Kusanagi is the keystone of Section 9, a shadowy government unit little known outside the inner circles of government. She’s a cyborg—a human brain enclosed in a prosthetic body; aside from that, we don’t get much backstory on her—or anything else—in this volume.
Instead, creator Masamune Shirow plunges us straight into the action. A group of diplomats are making some sort of a shady deal, their meeting is attacked, one of them claims diplomatic immunity, and almost instantly, he is taken out by a shower of explosive shells. The assassin seems to float alongside the building and fade into the background. In the final panel of this short story, she is seen sitting in a government office. A few pages later, she is informed that Section 9 has been created and assigned a budget. And we’re off!
Shirow plunges directly into the next story, sending Kusanagi and her team off to an orphanage where they suspect someone is hacking into the kids’ brains—”cyber-brainwashing” in the lingo of the series—something apparently tolerated by the government until it gets out of hand. (Honestly, the story is sometimes hard to follow—Shirow’s storytelling can be maddeningly elliptical.) In the future, advanced technology allows humans to replace some or all of their bodies with prosthetics and to connect their brains to a larger network, allowing information sharing but also leaving their minds vulnerable to hacking. So, in the parlance of the series, the “ghost” is the soul—the essence of the human—and the “shell” is the body. A ghost can be transferred or even duplicated and moved to another body, although Shirow does regard the body, and its sensations and memories, as an important part of being’s personality.

If that sounds deep, well, you can pretty much take the technology as a given and simply enjoy the ride, as Kusanagi and her Section 9 posse take on a series of assignments, often riding in their Fuchikomas—armored vehicles with artificial intelligence and personalities of their own. There’s a complicated geopolitical motivation for each adventure, with corrupt government officials and corporate leaders planning various double-crosses, but also a lot of shooting and chasing, making for a good action story even if you’re not too detail-oriented. In the final few chapters of the first volume, Kusanagi faces a shadowy hacker, the Puppeteer, and the story switches to a more psychological-philosophical tone, although still with plenty of action. The ending leaves open the possibility of future adventures, and there are two subsequent volumes, The Ghost in the Shell 1.5: Human Error Processor and The Ghost in the Shell 2: Man-Machine Interface, which Kodansha has also republished in deluxe format.
One of the fascinating things about the series today is that it’s a book from the past that’s imagining the future. Instead of zeppelins and steam-powered cities, it’s visualizing an internet that was then on the verge of creation. As a result, there’s a great deal of physicality to the world. Most of the characters communicate through some sort of thought transfer, presumably enabled by an implant; other times, they just plug into another brain with a wire. They send paperwork by fax and have little computers, complete with keyboards, next to the wheels of their cars. In one story, a hacker attempts to foil the Section 9 team by transmitting from different pay phones, though he also is capable of implanting false memories in a stooge to make him a confederate. Anachronisms aside, Shirow has anticipated some of the social consequences of the connected world, particularly the impact of hackers and cyber-espionage.
Sometimes a pioneering work is less a good read than a historically interesting document, but The Ghost in the Shell holds up pretty well as science fiction. It demands a lot from the reader, as Shirow plunges us into his world without spending much time on exposition, but the world is a fascinating one, and the main characters quickly emerge as well-defined personalities working as a coherent team: the gruff, ape-faced Aramaki is the section chief overseeing the team; the steely Kusanagi is the commander on the ground; her sidekick Batou is a loyal companion; Togusa is the token human, a former cop with a wife and a baby; and Ishikawa is the tech expert. While the focus is on the ops, there are flashes of humor and personal business as well.
For those who want to go deeper, Shiro annotates the story in the margins, commenting on the politics or technology and sometimes admitting that what he’s depicting is conjectural or implausible. However, these asides are entirely optional; in fact, he suggests you skip them the first time around.

The Ghost in the Shell has been around for a long time, in many different guises and formats (including a cult classic anime film and a highly regarded spinoff anime series, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex). The comic ran as a series in Japan from 1989 to 1990 in Kodansha’s Young Magazine, and was published as a standalone volume in 1991. It was one of the first manga to be published in English: Dark Horse brought it out as single-issue comics in 1995, following that up with a collected edition the same year. These early Dark Horse editions were flipped, reading left to right, and two pages that included an explicit sex scene were omitted (an adjacent panel was also redrawn). In 2004, Dark Horse published an uncensored version, but the art was still flipped. Kodansha Comics published its own edition in 2009, but it was essentially the same as the earlier Dark Horse version—both flipped and censored.
The new Deluxe Edition, which coincides with the release of the movie, is unflipped, finally giving the English audience a version that reads right to left. The original sound effects have been restored, with translations in the back of the book. Compared to the 2009 edition, the color pages are richer and more saturated, which is a real plus. Also, the dialogue has been relettered, and in some cases the speech balloons have been shrunk, allowing more of the art to show through. Unfortunately, the lettering is uneven and harder to read, and a number of errors have endured across editions.

The Deluxe Edition doesn’t restore material omitted from the earlier English-language versions. The two revised pages (which can quickly be located with a simple internet search) came early in the book, and depicted Kusanagi having sex with two other women. Dark Horse originally dropped them because their inclusion would have made the book harder to market at a time when manga was just gaining a foothold in the U.S and obscenity cases were still fresh in the publisher’s memory. With regard to the present edition, Kodansha Comics made a statement to the comics site Bleeding Cool to the effect that they were complying with Shirow’s wishes by excluding them; the manga-ka preferred the redrawn pages become the definitive version going forward.
That said, while the omitted pages don’t impact the story, without them, the dialogue immediately afterward doesn’t make much sense. Leaving them out also effectively erases a part of Kusanagi’s sexuality: later on she is shown to have a boyfriend, and it’s hinted that she has many short-term relationships, but the fact that she enjoys sex with women is effectively erased.
Quibbles aside, the Deluxe Edition comes as close as any English-language edition has to representing the manga the way Shirow wants it, even if it wasn’t the way it was originally published. While the movie adaptation has existed under a cloud of controversy since the casting of a white actress in the lead role first came to light, the manga stands alone as an influential classic of the genre, and the medium.
The Ghost in the Shell: Deluxe Edition is available now in hardcover.