Man-Machine Interface

Shirow Masamune has been turning the world of graphic fiction on its ear since...well, since he's been creating graphic fiction. The sheer immensity of his talent and imagination has burned an indelible mark on comics, animation, gaming, and popular culture - and probably quantum physics, for all I know - that has grown to the point of near ubiquity. You can barely turn around inside a comics shop, toy store, or video arcade without bumping into imagery influenced by, homaged to, or just flat-out stolen from Shirow: the breathtaking future-shock landscapes; the babes; the cutting-edge design; the babes; the mind-warping whirlwind of technology and metaphysics; and the babes.

And did I mention the babes? Anyway...

Despite the traffic snarl of such "sincerest form of flattery", Shirow has always kept his lead on the pack, prepping the rollout of his latest pavement-eating fuel dragster while the others are still peddling along with training wheels. While projects like Appleseed and Dominion set a standard that placed him among the giants of the medium, Shirow raised the bar with Ghost in the Shell, changing comics and animation forever. Shirow moved forward with more projects in a variety of media until the time came for the serialization of Ghost's sequel, Man-Machine Interface, which kicked that bar well out of reach of mere mortals. When the time came to collect his latest epic, Shirow had been moving in new artistic directions, embracing cutting-edge digital tools and the limitless fuel they offered to his big-block creative engine. Shirow felt the need to revisit MMI, add a few pages, polish it a bit, give it a new paint job.

Time passed. A year passed. And another. Shirow's fans - hell, Shirow's editors - wondered what was going on. And on. The final MMI kept idling, the release date moved back and moved back again as Shirow added, adjusted, conjured. Finally, in 2001, ten years after the initial launch of its serialization, the completed Man-Machine Interface was delivered.

(Sound of jaws dropping.)

Well, this wasn't your daddy's Man-Machine Interface, and the reason for the delay became obviously apparent with the turn of each new "Look at this! / Oh, my God... / No WAY!" page. Shirow had not only completely rebuilt his story with over a hundred pages of new color material), but had utterly transmuted his approach to the form: fully realized, three-dimensional, more-real-than-real sets; gorgeous floods of digital color, texture, and imbedded graphics; dazzling special effects and dizzying utilization of space and perspective. Visions like nothing seen before on the comics page - or anywhere else, for that matter. Immersing, hallucinatory, riveting storytelling that arguably comes closer to shattering the medium's boundaries than anything the form has offered to date. And all this laced together with Shirow's most ambitious foray into his singular melding of science, philosophy, religion, and the nature of intelligence and the cosmos. Ghost in the Shell 2: Man-Machine Interface runs your brain through the wringer, frappés it in a blender, and then throws what's left of it into a particle accelerator set on high. You may need to wear a helmet when you read it.

And now you'll get your chance, thanks to Kodansha International, Studio Proteus, translator Frederik L. Schodt (who's gone through a case of helmets already), and some bums called Dark Horse.

We've been waiting a long, long time for this one. Was it worth it?

Well, duh.

- Chris Warner, Senior Editor