Briareos, with his rabbit ears, had to be part of the inspiration for the Commissioner Gordon Batman during Scott Snyder's run. The backgrounds are hyper detailed at times, as are the landmates, the mecha of the series. I have to think some things were lost in translation.Īnyway, the art is great. The cyborgs running the city have their own game going, as does Athena, one of the brass from the Central Management Bureau. There aren't a lot of jobs for people from the badlands and Hitomi, their host, is clearly up to something. Deunan and Briareos come to Olympus and find maybe the wastelands weren't so bad. Utopia isn't all its cracked up to be is the central message of Appleseed. Anyway, Dark Horse reprinted Appleseed a few years ago so I figured it was time to catch up.

I read a few issues of Appleseed back in the day but lost track of it. Manga was really hard to come by in those hazy times before the internet. Olympus is a utopia at first glance but there's a power struggle brewing in the shadows and Deunan and Briareos are about to be dragged into the middle of it. In the aftermath of a world war, Deunan and her cyborg companion Briareos are living in a deserted, ruined city until Hitomi, a woman from Olympus, brings them to her city on behalf of the Central Management Bureau. Two more volumes of Appleseed followed before he began work on Ghost in the Shell. After a professional reprint of Black Magic and a second volume of Appleseed, he released Dominion in 1986. The story was a sensation, and won the 1986 Seiun Award for Best Manga. The result was Appleseed, a full volume of densely-plotted drama taking place in an ambiguous future. His work caught the eye of Seishinsha President Harumichi Aoki, who offered to publish him.

While in college, he developed an interest in manga, which led him to create his own complete work, Black Magic, which was published in the manga fanzine Atlas. Shirow is also known for creating erotic art.īorn in the Hyōgo Prefecture capital city of Kobe, he studied oil painting at Osaka University of Arts. He is best known for the manga Ghost in the Shell, which has since been turned into two theatrical anime movies, two anime TV series, an anime TV movie, and several video games. Masamune Shirow ( 士郎正宗) is an internationally renowned manga artist.

Appleseed, Vol. 1 by Masamune Shirow