It bordered on philosophy-student gibberish at times, and yet it was a blessing to any manga reader who wanted something to think about.

His comics unsubtly reminded readers of this by having characters spout off reams of tangential discussion about the Gaia hypothesis, particle physics, or just how human a disembodied brain can be. Shirow’s stuff was hardly of great substance, but his stories were usually driven by interesting ideas. Most of the manga titles foisted on readers in the 1990s were cutesy piffle or dated pulp ( completely unlike today’s scene, of course), and they were lightweight even when they were enjoyable. Shirow grew even more popular with the mainstream exposure of the first Ghost in the Shell film in 1996, and it wasn’t all just because he could draw anime chicks straddling mechanized police armor. And then there was Orion, a mixture of space opera, Buddhist-Shinto mysticism, and concepts so insane that Shirow admitted he didn't even known what they meant. Ghost in the Shell added more police drama and copious lumps of artificial-intelligence ruminations, while Dominion went the opposite direction and made a silly comic about tank-driving cops in a future of pollution and terrorist robot catgirls. It wasn’t just Appleseed, either, as Shirow recycled the same approach (Women! Mechanical suits! Violence!) in better form. It appealed to content-starved American comic readers of the 1990s, and Shirow caught on in a big way. It set many Shirow standards: pretty and highly lethal heroines, police-procedural stories, rampant philosophical technobabble, and incredibly detailed mechanical designs for everything from firearms to city-crawling robots.

Shirow started off in the 1980s with a generic spaceship manga called Black Magic, but no one was really impressed until he rolled out Appleseed, a dense tale of science and politics gone astray in a 21st-century urban utopia. Yet his reputation is a lean shadow of what it was during the 1990s, when Shirow seemed unstoppable. Those comics are kept in print, and his name is invoked and praised whenever a new Appleseed movie or Ghost in the Shell adaptation arrives. True, he remains well-known in the North American anime and manga market, largely because of comics he made nearly twenty years ago. Few authors in the manga industry went wrong like Masamune Shirow.

Ghost in the Shell by Masamune Shirow