Ghost in the Shell is 25 years old, and this manga has not aged a day. Dense, rhythmic, intelligent, and gripping, it remains a window onto our near future. Unfortunately, the general public knows little about this major work of Japanese science fiction. Many have only seen the films or series adapted from it (out of laziness?). Likewise, the original author is less well known than Mamoru Oshii, the filmmaker who adapted the work into a feature film. To try to restore the balance, here is a portrait of one of Japan’s most discreet manga artists.

What do we know about Shirow’s life? Nothing. There is no official photograph, and few personal details are available. Moreover, Masamune Shirow is a pseudonym, and despite all the rumors circulating online, his real name is unknown. He generally represents himself as an octopus and has released only a few sketches of himself at work. Sparing with interviews, the manga artist prefers to let his work speak for itself.

Everything we know fits in a pocket handkerchief. Born on November 23, 1961, in Kobe, he made his debut in drawing during his university studies in Fine Arts in a fanzine titled Atlas. Later, he became a drawing teacher before he could truly make a living from his manga. He did not read much manga during his childhood and was instead influenced by Studio Nue animation (Yamato, Macross) and the Gundam series. Later, he discovered the manga of Katsuhiro Otomo (Akira) and Fujihiko Hosono (Crusher Joe). Passionate about the latest technical innovations and research, he spends a great deal of time reading to keep informed, which gives rise to rather dense footnotes in his manga. And that is about all. As a result, one has to look for more information in his works.

At a high level, technology is equivalent to magic

Shirow shares with Isaac Asimov and Terry Pratchett the idea that at a very high level, technology can seem magical to ordinary people. Only the discourse surrounding the action changes. This is doubtless why he titled his first manga Black Magic M66. Published in a fanzine during his university years in 1983, this one-shot contains in germ his entire universe: utopia and political intrigue in a cyberpunk world, the difficult coexistence between humans and artificial creations, mythological references, and above all action with a heroine who hits far harder than the men.

The plot features Duna Typhon, a female bioroid with very extensive powers who prefigures Deunan from Appleseed, with whom she shares the same initial and very little diplomacy. The action takes place on Venus, where the supercomputer Nemesis governs the living through its official representative, Zeus. With this series of mythological references, any reader familiar with Greek myths knows that this world is off to a rather bad start. Nemesis is indeed the goddess of vengeance among the Greeks. As for Typhon, he is one of the Titans who rebelled against Zeus. In this kind of draft of Appleseed, one senses that Shirow does not yet know where to place the emphasis or how to balance the different narrative threads (the police investigation, the overarching plot about the place of the living on Venus, etc.). In 1987, the animated version of this manga moreover focused on only part of the story in order to make it a coherent whole for a one-hour OVA. Even though he took part in developing the project by producing many preparatory drawings, Shirow was hardly pleased with the result and would be somewhat reluctant to collaborate on other projects afterward.

One thing is certain: this manga, however imperfect, allowed Shirow to meet the head of Seishinsha at a convention where he was selling his fanzine. Subsequently, this publishing house would publish almost all of the manga artist’s works without going through prepublication in a manga magazine, as is the practice everywhere else in Japan. These rather exceptional working conditions allowed the author to refine his drawing and develop a truly coherent futuristic universe.

Appleseed: The Seed in the Collective Imagination

In 1985, Seishinsha published Appleseed directly as a bound volume, and the work won an award for science fiction comics. It was on this occasion that a second major element would change Shirow’s life and the reception of manga in the West. (If that’s not a teaser, what is?)

But let’s go back a little and change countries. Toren Smith (1960–2013) was a Canadian comic book lover who moved to California to make a living from his passion by writing for various publishers. There he met another science fiction writer who introduced him to manga. Enthusiastic, Smith flew to Osaka for a science fiction convention: Daikon. There, normally, Evangelion fans hold their breath because they know that the opening short film of Daikon IV allowed a group of otaku to found Studio Gainax. Unfortunately, Smith did not have the chance to attend that historic moment. However, he did attend Daikon V and made a much more important encounter for the dissemination of manga outside Japan. Indeed, it was at this convention that Masamune Shirow received the award for best science fiction manga for Appleseed, a work that Smith would promote and translate for the USA. The Canadian was so sure of the manga’s quality that he founded his own company to translate and promote Japanese comics: Studio Proteus. Of the ten works that marked the beginnings of manga in the USA, he co-translated nine. Among them was Appleseed.

(It was through this translation that I myself discovered Shirow. At the time, this manga was sold at a prohibitive price in a comic book shop in Paris.)

It would take many years before France in turn benefited from a translation. But in the meantime, Shirow’s manga was read and assimilated by a whole generation of artists fascinated by the testosterone-fueled heroine Deunan Knute. The exoskeletons allowing soldiers and terrorists to confront each other in breathless action scenes also entered the collective imagination. It must be said that this manga was right in tune with the trend of the moment: in 1986, James Cameron released Aliens with a heroine who is not afraid of weapons and who fights the alien queen in a giant robot machine in the final scene. No wonder the director was a fan of Shirow and later promoted the film Ghost in the Shell.

Ghost in the Shell: The Consecration

If the four volumes of Appleseed allowed Shirow to refine his line and leave his position as an art teacher, the work nonetheless remained unknown to the general public. It also bears witness to an era when the Berlin Wall had not yet fallen and when computer terrorism was still a distant fiction, since the internet was in its infancy.

In Japan, the success of Appleseed attracted the attention of major publishers, and in 1989 Kodansha signed with Shirow for a series of pages in Young Magazine, one of its manga magazines aimed at seinen readers. It was during this period that the author created the first pages of Ghost in the Shell. In this work, the artist offers a more complex and more ambiguous world where political intrigues go hand in hand with technological manipulation, multinational corporations, and terrorism. Mythological references are more discreet, and explanatory notes on the universe punctuate almost every page.

Of course, the heroine Kusanagi is even more powerful and sexier than her predecessors. This cyborg commands Section 9 and investigates the less glamorous aspects of the futuristic universe imagined by the author. Here again, the work perfectly matches its era and anticipates the doubtless less optimistic atmosphere of Japan struck in 1995 by the sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway and the great Kobe earthquake that destroyed Shirow’s house. 1995 was also the year of the release of the film Ghost in the Shell and the American translation of the manga by Studio Proteus at Dark Horse.

I will not dwell on the creation and reception of the film because I have already written an article on it: the legacy of Mamoru Oshii’s film.

But it is clear that the film largely contributed to the success and fame of the manga even though it departs from the original atmosphere. Subsequently, Shirow invested himself in the creation of the series Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, far more faithful to the initial work. There we find the atmosphere of GITS: Human Error Processor, grouping investigations by Section 9. He was notably responsible for the design of the Tachikoma, tanks with astonishing intellectual capacities. Moreover, it was on this occasion that he worked more closely with Production IG, for whom he subsequently developed the concepts for the science fiction animated series Ghost Hound (2007) and Real Drive (2008).

Ghost in the Shell: The Burden of Success

The problem with the enormous success of the Ghost in the Shell film is that it gives a very distorted view of Shirow’s work, and one can well understand the disappointment or disbelief of fans of the feature film when they read what the publisher titled Ghost in the Shell 2. Gone is Kusanagi’s usual body, as she takes over various female bodies, each more buxom than the last, for an investigation linked to both terrorism and industrial espionage. The whole thing ends in an almost mystical way with an encounter between the former major and another version of herself. Disorienting even for Shirow fans, the manga above all bears witness to a desire to create color illustration.

Having started with oil painting at university, Shirow switched to acrylics for his manga and quickly became passionate about digital illustration. He experimented with several types of coloring on his Mac, leading to digital publications with hues that are almost too vibrant. In fact, there were two versions of GITS: Man Machine Interface (Ghost in the Shell 2 in France), one of which is more “restful” for the eyes…

Ghost in the Shell also eclipses Shirow’s other works released in the late 1990s, such as Dominion Tank Police 2 (1995), the sequel to the 1985 comic that was a kind of lighter, more comedic counterpart to Appleseed. Likewise, few people know Orion (1991). According to Shirow, this manga is to Ghost in the Shell what Black Magic M66 is to Appleseed. He defines it as a lighthearted manga, a comedy based on Japanese mythology and the Cthulhu mythos developed by H.P. Lovecraft. The whole thing is complicated by the fact that Shirow uses kanji that mean two or even three things at once…

Admittedly, Dominion and Orion remain minor works, but their limited commercial success compared to Ghost in the Shell may also have pushed publishers to ask the author for even more GITS, while in the meantime he had begun to take more pleasure in creating illustrations than manga.

From Manga Artist to Artist

Indeed, alongside the development of his manga, Shirow produced more and more illustrations for video games, novels, calendars, and artbooks. There he could more freely indulge his passion for muscular female bodies and machines without having to tie it all together with a storyline… In the artbook project Exon Depot, there were already three wordless manga, a kind of preamble to a Shirow who would gather his footnotes and dialogue elsewhere.

It must be said that the author seems more interested in creating a coherent futuristic universe than in producing manga set within it. Thus the world of Appleseed is shown in a volume containing only sketches and technical explanations (Data Book). Similarly, in Ghost in the Shell, certain chapters serve only to better show the futuristic world in which the adventures of Section 9 take place. This is the case for the chapter devoted to the creation of cyborgs and the one on the machine revolt. Outside his manga, Shirow also tried to build a science fiction universe through Neuro Hard. This project comprises about ten eight-page color chapters published in Dragon magazine between 1992 and 1994. There are manga pages, various sketches, and a great deal of scientific explanation in the form of notes. The whole thing takes place in 2300 on a planet where bees have evolved differently and where they coexist with humanoid aliens. The idea was to create a world for other manga artists to tell stories in.

But since the early 2000s, Shirow seems to have abandoned comics for erotic illustrations featuring women with glistening bodies in contortionist poses. Moreover, for GITS Arise, the manga is drawn by another artist. By the way, Western publications have misleading dates, and GITS 1.5, published in 2006 by Glénat, collects stories originally created between 1991 and 1995…

If the artist’s pin-ups are not enough to fuel your science fiction imagination, you will have to make do with the animated versions. Between the various GITS and the animated versions of Appleseed, Shirow’s cyberpunk news comes mainly through his adaptations, which fortunately are increasingly faithful to the original works.

From Exoskeletons to the Cyborg Body

So what remains of Masamune Shirow now that he no longer makes manga? Many women and mecha. That is the most obvious answer, but if you dig deeper, you realize that if Shirow makes his main characters women, it is not really because he is a feminist but rather for convenience. In an interview published at the end of the French version of Black Magic M66, he explains that these heroines are more symbols, signs, than individuals with real personalities. No wonder Mamoru Oshii later had difficulty understanding Kusanagi’s psyche… Deunan and her sisters are thus icons of this new attitude toward biotechnological creations. They share the same love of machines and a curiosity for all new developments. Incidentally, it seems that it is more pleasant to draw female bodies all day long than muscular men. Moreover, the heroines’ bodies take on a lot more volume over time. If Duna could pass for an anorexic version of Jane Birkin, Kusanagi has both muscles and very prominent female attributes. As for Deunan, she can be seen filling out in every way over the four volumes of Appleseed. His mastery of color goes hand in hand with this sexualization of bodies, and the shift from acrylics to digital painting above all allows him to create variations on flesh tones with a series of illustrations devoted to oiled female bodies…

When it comes to mecha, Masamune’s love of technology is blatant. He spends almost more time thinking about and drawing robots, weapons, and vehicles than his characters. Unlike other manga artists who often entrust background elements to assistants, he works alone and draws all the objects, vehicles, and mecha himself. The Appleseed Data Book, the explanatory mini-strips, Neuro Hard, and the numerous footnotes all bear witness to his taste for scientific explanation and anticipation. Between the first exoskeletons of Appleseed and the Tachikomas of Ghost in the Shell, he reflects on the different techniques for reproducing movement, the pilot’s position in the armor-vehicle, and the form of artificial intelligence in the machine to compensate for the pilot’s shortcomings.

One may wonder to what extent the cyborg bodies are not simply “exoskeletons” for the Kusanagi of GITS: Man Machine Interface. Her “ghost” is somewhere in cyberspace, and she takes possession of multiple empty shells scattered around the world, or she hacks into a cyborg’s body to move around. A variant of this idea is found in the two GITS TV series, where the Tachikomas possess a unique artificial intelligence resulting from the experience of all the tank-robots. They can then “back themselves up” somewhere in cyberspace and “live” even if all the tanks in the real world are dismantled. This development of the Tachikomas as characters partly picks up on a chapter of the Ghost in the Shell manga in which Kusanagi hacks into a Fuchikoma to push the other intelligent tanks to revolt against humans. For her, it is a test of the machines’ loyalty toward the human agents who manipulate them.

Masamune Shirow’s enthusiasm for the notion of exoskeletons obviously led him to take an interest in insects, the natural prototypes of living entities with exoskeletons. But the animal that fascinated him most seems to be the spider. He thus spends part of his leisure time photographing them and seems particularly attached to the jumping spider, a variety that does not weave a web but is capable of jumping as far as fifty times its own length and possesses a lightning-fast venom for its prey. Spiders are moreover the models for the Fuchikomas and especially the Tachikomas. One recognizes the bulging body part where the pilot sits, the multiple legs, and the “eyes” that can evoke those of a spider. Another similar element: the Tachikomas can project a cable over a distance that brings to mind the silk of arthropods. In Neuro Hard, Masamune Shirow is more interested in bees, whose society is organized in a very different way from that of humans.