Ghost In The Shell:Man Machine Interface. Shirow Masamune (Writer & Artist). Dark Horse Magna (2005)

Wonderful, if not quite successful, ambitious full tilt science fiction busting with big ideas, humour and fantastic art. Motoko Aramaki, a counter-terrorist net security expert works for the giant Poseidon Industrial corporation. An attack at one of the companies facilities leads to greater puzzles and elusive enemy. Motoko is as much at home travelling the information lines of the net as she is in any of her cyborg bodies. She slips from one body and information nexus to another as she tracks the threat, along the way she encounters a entity from the Channelling Agency, a mysterious official organisation. As Motoko fights physical and cyber battles she draws closer to the extraordinary secret at the heart of the events.
Shirow Masamue's reach exceeds his grasp in this story, there is a wonderful density of detail matched against a flow of big ideas that does not quite cohere in a successful way. The details start to drown out the ideas and the ideas are not quite carried off with the force required. None of which detracts from the astounding journey that the story takes. The overall concept, of humans being equipped with cyber brains that have a constant connecting with a global cyber network, the significantly increased use of cyberisation of bodies blurring the lines of what is human is superbly exploited. Motoko is a an evolved creature,her physical bodies are all cyborgs, her consciousness, in essence her humanity or her ghost, is anchored in the infrastructure of the net.
This allows Shirow Masamune to have Motoko roam the globe easily, dropping into bodies storied at various locations to engage in stunning action set pieces. A propensity for panty shots is unfortunate and jarring. The cyber action is managed with explosive artwork that means that the information network is visualised in the most engaging and astounding way. The strategy of piling on the detail, including very funny footnotes from the creator, is effective for most of the story but becomes overwhelming at the end. As the big conclusion is approached the story falters instead of flying.
As a partial failure is is wildly more successful that most comics and extravagantly more successfully than than most science fiction, in comic form or not. The willingness to embrace and exploit the possibilities if both comics and science fiction is exhilarating and joyous, not to be missed.

Ghost In The Shell. Shirow Masamune. Dark Horse Manga (2004)

A great collection of stories revolving around an anti-terrorist public security team in a future Japan where the boundaries between human and machine are becoming blurred due to advances in prosthetics. Public Security Section 9 is lead by Major Motoko Kusanagi who has a fully artificial body, her spine and brain are the only biological elements, the rest of the team are more or less equipped with mechanical upgrades. They operate in an information drenched society where a cyberbrain in required to provide access to the net and allow normal functioning. This naturally gives new opportunities to criminals an terrorists to infiltrate individuals and attack the "Ghost in the Shell", the human personality of the individual. The stories are nicely varied, they mix up the political landscape of the future state of Japan with straightforward criminal activities. The final episodes raise interesting questions about what would happen if a machine intelligence became self aware.
This is a really dense comic, the art is crowed with detail and the stories are packed with ideas and explanations as well. Shirow Masamue manages to use this density to enhance the momentum of the stories, to place his cast in a credible context and to bring them to vivid and sharply defined life. The art is wonderfully easy to read and skillfully uses changing styles to move the mood of the story. Major Motoko is a great character, vibrantly human in her artificial body.
Ghost in the Shell is smart, funny and thoughtful science fiction, in a word, brilliant.

Ghost in the Shell. Manga Entertainment Ltd. DVD (1995)

A classic, beautiful animation, strong ideas, moody effective soundtrack all combine to create a stunning science fiction masterwork. Based on the extraordinary book by Masamune Shirow it clearly stands on its own. In the near future cyborg bodies will be more common, expensive and requiring regular maintenance, still they will be in reasonably common use. The most common use is to have implants that allow you to directly connect to a network and communicate directly with another person, right up to completely cybernetic bodies housing a human brain. Major Motoko Kusanagi works for Section 9, an anti-terrorist government agency. Since she is introduced in a scene in which she assassinates a foreign diplomat , anti-terrorist may be taken as having a flexible definition. The Major and the rest of her team become involved in a plot by a super hacker, The Puppetmaster, which steadily unravels to being both considerably more and much less than expected. The film traces how something extraordinary can have very squalid roots. This nice mix of bureaucratic infighting and philosophical investigation is what gives the film its spine. It never looses sight of being a exciting thriller either with superbly staged and paced action sequences that still dazzle with their complex artistry.

Science fiction can frequently age very badly as the assumed future is left in the dust by the current present, Ghost in the Shell sidesteps this by taking a very radical approach to the future and more importantly having a strong central core to it. The art and craft of the animation has not aged either, the detail lavished on the cityscape's is still a joy to behold, the technology is wonderfully integrated into the story, it is very much the human concerns that are to the forefront and they are always relevant and up to date. This film continues to set a standard for ambitious, stylish animated science fiction that later films are judged by.