We Have Seen the Future and It Is Awful: Essential Cyberpunk Manga

Don’t be intimidated by this manga’s classic status; one of the hallmarks of a masterpiece is that it holds up over time, and Katsuhiro Otomo’s story of disaffected youth in a post-apocalyptic Tokyo is as compellingly readable today as it was when it was first published, in the early ’90s. It’s a noisy manga, filled with motorcycles that roar through blasted landscapes and lovingly drawn helicopters and police vehicles that chase after them, to no avail. The twist here are the espers, who appear as children with wizened faces and have minimal control over their own destructive telekinetic powers. After an encounter with one such being, 15-year-old Tetsuo starts to develop powers himself, and soon has taken over one of the most violent gangs in the area. His former friend Kaneda, meanwhile, gets mixed up with a group of freedom fighters who are trying to stop The Colonel, the powerful military figure who controls the espers. The two former friends must battle not only each other, but also the various factions of Neo Tokyo—and the mysterious being known as Akira.

The original Battle Order Alita series, published in English by Viz, is long out of print in North America, but this sequel series stands well on its own. Alita is a cyborg whose head was found in a trash heap; she was put back together by a cyber-doctor named Ido, and the first series chronicles their adventures. Battle Angel Alita: Last Order opens with Alita being reconstructed once more, this time by the scientist Desty Nova, although she awakens to find the man has been killed. In the previous story, Alita discovered that most of the people in the sky city of Tiphares had their brains replaced with microchips. Now, she learns Nova broadcast that information to the public, resulting in chaos and revolution; since the replacement operation takes place at the age of 19, the teenagers are running the city. Like The Ghost in the Shell, this story mixes robot-fighting action with questions about what makes us human, as, like many of her counterparts in other stories, Alita has self-awareness and some human consciousness, although many people treat her as simply a robot. A live-action American adaptation of the original series, Alita: Battle Angel, is set for release in 2018.

If you’re thinking that robot shootouts and motorcycle gangs are all very well, but just not gory enough, have we got the manga for you! Smokin’ Parade is a new series from the team that brought us Deadman Wonderland, so you know that there will be blood—lots of blood—but also a complex underlying story. In the future imagined by Kataoka and Kondou, any body part can be replaced, but in a small percentage of cases, the transplants go horribly wrong, turning the recipient into psychotic killers with a big animal mascot head. When this happens, the Jackalopes, an elite team of cybernetically enhanced vigilantes, swoops in and terminates the unfortunate patient with extreme prejudice and a lot of firepower. Teenage Youkou learns this the hard way when his sister gets new legs and celebrates his birthday by chopping off his limbs. The Jackalopes show up to finish her off and, when they discover Youkou has survived, take him back to their headquarters and fit him up with prosthetics. Predictably, he decides to join up, and as the action gets under way, the creators roll back the curtain on a new piece of the story: the shadowy involvement of the pharmaceutical company that makes the transplants, headed up by a pneumatic-breasted dominatrix who likes to bathe in a pool filled with human organs. As you might guess, Smokin’ Parade comes by its M rating honestly, and is not for the weak of stomach.

This story is a little lighter than the other titles mentioned, although it definitely has its dark moments. In the late 21st century, scientists discover a new fourth dimension, Dimension W (as opposed to the X, Y, and Z axes), and they figure out how to tap into it as an infinite energy source using devices called coils. Soon, almost everyone has a personal coil, which collects and transmits information about the user. A single company, New Tesla Energy, controls all the legal coils, so they also get the energy, and they deliberately limit the coils’ power to prevent misuse. Any coils not made by New Tesla are illegal, which naturally leads to a robust black market. Kyouma Mabuchi eschews coils altogether and likes to tinker with old-school technology such as gasoline-powered cars. He makes his living as a “Collector,” finding and recovering illegal coils, which he turns over to Mary, a wealthy woman who acts as sort of an agent. The third character in this story is Mira, a female robot with strong human characteristics who calls herself the “daughter” of New Tesla founder Shidou Yurizaki. Yurizaki has been missing for two years, and Mira knows some things about his life that New Tesla wants to keep under cover. Creator Yuji Iwahara paints an imaginative view of a future where energy is free and abundant but also tightly controlled.There’s humor as well as darkness in this fast-paced story.

One of the things you see a lot of in cyberpunk manga is decay—as if the world of the story was created but never maintained. Blame! takes this to an extreme. It is set in a vast and cavernous City that was built by mechanical buildings called Builders; it’s sort of a mega version of the Winchester House, filled with chasms and levels that are not necessarily connected to one another. Killy, the main character, travels through this labyrinth searching for humans with Net Terminal Genes, which allow them to access the ultimate Internet of Things, the network that controls the City. The story is atmospheric if sometimes hard to follow, as Nihei starts more or less in the middle of it and builds outward, establishing bits of his world as he goes.

Let’s wrap this up with a prose collection of short stories by a quintet of Japanese sci-fi writers that stretches the boundaries of Masamune Shirow’s The Ghost in the Shell. Although they use his concepts, these stories are self-contained, so you don’t have to have read the manga or watched the anime to enjoy them.
What’s your favorite sci-fi manga?