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A review by justiceofkalr
Ghost in the Shell 2: Man-Machine Interface by Masamune Shirow
1.0
I really hate to give such a low rating to anything Ghost in the Shell, but this really deserved it.
The majority of this manga is, to put it bluntly, complete and utter crap. I love Ghost in the Shell and I usually love Shirow's art, but this book was pretty terrible. We'll start off with the story. Most of it gets lost completely in all the technobabble (complete with rambling footnotes) and most of the time I had no idea what was going on. Motoko (not the same as the original) spends most of the story floating around nude in cyperspace while ordering her ridiculous looking AI assistants to put out decoys and toy bombs and other techno jargon nonsense. Most of this could have been cut and the story might have seemed a bit more cohesive. Then there's the art. It's pretty terrible too. Shirow seems to be using some weird combination of more 3-d realistic looking art and flat anime art and it just doesn't work well. It's jarring and most of the 3-d looks bad. He also randomly switches between color and black & white, sometimes right in the middle of the page. Plus there was a ridiculous amount of fanservice everywhere. I'm used to some from Shirow, but the majority of the book was Motoko floating around nude or running around in various bodies flashing her underwear in awkward action shots. Overall I don't think I'd recommend this to anybody. Really the only merit I saw in it was in elements of it that were drawn on for the anime.
The majority of this manga is, to put it bluntly, complete and utter crap. I love Ghost in the Shell and I usually love Shirow's art, but this book was pretty terrible. We'll start off with the story. Most of it gets lost completely in all the technobabble (complete with rambling footnotes) and most of the time I had no idea what was going on. Motoko (not the same as the original) spends most of the story floating around nude in cyperspace while ordering her ridiculous looking AI assistants to put out decoys and toy bombs and other techno jargon nonsense. Most of this could have been cut and the story might have seemed a bit more cohesive. Then there's the art. It's pretty terrible too. Shirow seems to be using some weird combination of more 3-d realistic looking art and flat anime art and it just doesn't work well. It's jarring and most of the 3-d looks bad. He also randomly switches between color and black & white, sometimes right in the middle of the page. Plus there was a ridiculous amount of fanservice everywhere. I'm used to some from Shirow, but the majority of the book was Motoko floating around nude or running around in various bodies flashing her underwear in awkward action shots. Overall I don't think I'd recommend this to anybody. Really the only merit I saw in it was in elements of it that were drawn on for the anime.