Cyberpunk Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels
shellzine.net
shellzine.net
The last one I enjoyed watching was Arise but I lost track after that. I think the series has been done to death and I would love to see some completely new IP from Masamune that is more reflective of the AI and economic upheavals we are experiencing in the 20s.
[1]: https://kodansha.us/series/the-ghost-in-the-shell-the-human-...
The nature (infamy?) of his activities over the past few years should also be noted. (And maybe chuckled at if you have a bit of a dark sense of humor.)
His popularity may have corrupted him...
The most recent manga he involved with was Ghost Urn, which explores the world of GitS from a different protagonist. He did not do the drawing, but did most of the worldbuilding and mecha design.
I agree that you can find genuinely disturbing things in the manga world and that Masamune's work is relatively benign (though some of his depictions of less-developed adult women might upset some). In general, I find the idea of commercialized erotica amusing, especially when coming from sources with more mainstream claims-to-fame. In these cases, I don't attach a connotation of moral bankruptcy or anything like that to the idea of them being "infamous", though maybe that's just me using the word wrong. I intend it more in the sense of, "Hahah, oh wow, THAT guy did THAT? That's crazy." Kind of like when we found out about Tezuka's softcore furry/snakewomen doodles.
Whatever narrative you've invented of Shirow changing over time is a stretch.
Shirow's manga is horny though, partly why I dislike it.
It's arty but there's no doubt it's done that way in part due to horniness.
I view the portrayal of Kusanagi as being steeped in aspects of the male gaze in a metatextual way. Japanese society has a high emphasis on traditional beauty standards, and the artists depicting her as a character use her beauty as a foil against the audience, by contrasting her beauty with her strength, and by subverting the desires of the audience by drawing our attention to her humanity by alienation through destroying her body at multiple points in the series. Her desire to protect her comrades at the cost of her body shows us how she is willing to sacrifice her femininity, being forced to regress to a childlike body.
The series have a lot of fan service, but I believe that it’s intentional so that the audience is forced to confront their own biases and stereotypes about women and about cyborgs/robots. The cyborg nature of her body as it is destroyed reads to me as a visual metaphor for the Madonna/whore double standard women are subject to society.
I guess I don’t disagree with your view, so much as I think that how she is depicted works on multiple levels in-universe and with respect to the viewer, and said depictions serve multiple functions in the text.
Movie Kusanagi is her own thing, mostly unrelated to the manga or other adaptations.
The manga is different.
(The site is now intermittently down, with "429 Too many requests".)
The only version that didn't add anything new was the Hollywood movie, which was an entertaining but shallow derivative of Oshii's animes and not based on the manga at all.
I think the original material provides enough ideas to continue spinning off new remixes. It hasn't even been outdated by the recent advancements in AI. Quite the opposite.
- the first Oshii movie
- the two seasons of SAC + SSS
- this new one*
*so far
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shxS5YpyK04&list=PLyhSewr7ii...
I've enjoyed it so far.
Did you get your manga the same place they sell the 15 minute long Tarantino movie Pulp Fiction?
To me, Mamoru Oshii's 1995 GitS is THE version, because I'm seldom in the mood for slapstick and I much prefer the introspective mood of the movie, and its cinematic visuals. And the music!
I haven't liked any other adaptations since. To me, the movie is almost perfect. I didn't like Innocence much though.
I just can't get over how pretentious it is, and also I miss Motoko in it. I mean, the first movie (1995) also toyed with pretentiousness, but this was miraculously curtailed before it had a chance to bog the whole movie down [1], and its awesome mood, soundtrack -- much like with Blade Runner, another favorite of mine, I find it hard to separate the movie from its awesome soundtrack -- and visuals overpowered everything else. Motoko questioning if she was human, and what it mean to be human, it all worked for me. Maybe if she had spent the whole movie doing this, without any payoff, I'd like it less.
Innocence has great visuals too, I'll grant you this!
[1] mostly because the movie ends :D
also go read my comic about a robot lady with reality issues, http://egypt.urnash.com/rita/, it's got cover quotes from three people with seven Hugos between them.
The new one (EZY) is amazing if you haven't seen it.
1. Patlabor The Early Days (88-89, 7 OVA) -> Patlabor (89, Movie) -> Patlabor 2 (93, movie)
2. Patlabor The TV Series (89-90, 47 eps) -> Patlabor The New Files (90-92, 16 eps) -> Patlabor EZY (26-27, 3 movies)
Patlabor movie 2 was directed by the same director as the original 1995 GiTS animation movie. Both patlabor 1 / 2 have similar themes to GiTS, and are heavily cyber punk in themes and esthetics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Never
Not all stories are cyberpunk, but many are.
Some are great.
Anche Lazarus Ledd (uno dei bonellidi più famosi) ha un certo numero di storie cyberpunk, alcune delle quali molto carine.
If you liked Frontier's theme and are into video games I recommend you check out "Citizen Sleeper" [1] illustrated by Guillaume Singelin as well.
It's a 7 hour narrative text-based adventure that really hooked me one week-end. Your choices depend on how you "spend" your dice, dice that are cast at the beginning of every single day on the station so you get to pre-plan your actions somewhat.
Gameplay wise it's mostly reading, but I liked exploring the station they created.
[0] https://www.magnetic-press.com/carbon-and-silicon/
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1578650/Citizen_Sleeper/
Anime counterpart to this article: https://shellzine.net/cyberpunk-anime/
OTOH, robocop is ok on the list, so probably it should be there too.
Is Judge Dredd cyberpunk? I don't care. It's an incredible run of comics, that touches on many of the same themes as cyberpunk.
There are many people involved in Dredd over the years, but I do think John Wagner has had the rare opportunity among work for hire creators to shepherd a fictional universe over decades of real and in universe time.
Maybe the incal world doesnt really qualify as punk and more like regular scifi or perhaps bordeline new-agey, but it doesn’t strike me as fundamentally different from Akira in story style.
In particular: is anyone personally using a color eink device that's as practical for .cbr files as kindle is for regular ebooks?
It is by the same illustrator as Thorgal, Grzegorz Rosiński.
(PS. in Rosiński's home land, Poland, those comics have been know under the name "Yans" because Hans was too German for that time)
https://archive.org/details/william-gibson-s-neuromancer-vol...
It was a shame it never finished covering the entirety of the first novel.
The overarching story is about a pandemic that starts as a backdrop and becomes more important and metaphysical and religious as the story goes on but the core of it revolves around crime bosses in Latin America, the lives of prostitutes, a Uyghur rebellion in Xinjiang, political conflict and organized crime all done in a very real way. It's completely devoid of any (manga) tropes or genre aesthetics.
I can’t believe they cancelled the tv show :(
Great show, agree with the intense disappointment of it's cancellation.
A few things to add to my ever-growing list.
"The One ... is a kind of landmark; a pulling together of obsessions and ingenious storytelling ideas into a coherent whole ... Its revisionist superheroics, while conceived at roughly the same time, predate Watchmen and Dark Knight in terms of publication, as does its packaging. Its political and humanist preoccupations were voiced before such sentiments became chic. Its deranged, culture-conscious humor offers an alternative and an antidote to today's rather gloomy trend of pessimistic, post-modern ultra-humans... Whatever it is that the comic books of the 1980s turn out to be remembered for, The One was right there in the thick of it, carving out a niche in the mainstream for dangerous ideas long before dangerous ideas became box-office certainties."But despite the author's veneration of 90s and 2000s, I'd argue the works from the late 2000s and early 2010s are just as sophisticated and arguably more relevant to our modern world; Project Itoh (Genocidal Organ, Harmony), Gatchaman Crowds, Beatless, alot of their themes were prescient; Because the frontier isn't hardware, it's ontology and semantics.
The Ghost In The Shell: Global Neural Network features one story by LRNZ. His work Geist Maschine (in italian only) is amazing.
Among the Cyberpunk 2077 comics, Big City Dreams is also very good.
As a result, unfortunately, there is very little “new” material. The old material that took centuries to develop and longer has been flattened and duplicated, over and over again. I sound like a curmudgeon (I probably am), but I stopped watching movies entirely not too long ago because it became a farce of seeing cliche writing. Shows are even worse so as to not even warrant discussing.
At least we have houses like A24 which brings interesting content
their old catalog though, incredible. i’d say like 80+ percent of the movies they released were fucking amazing. but that has fallen dramatically.
neon is still going strong though!
stop getting recs from algorithms and the entire world will open back up to you. just like top40 music and generic movies from back in the day, you’re getting the lowest common denominator recs.
i read a book about the music industry in the 80s (it’s been a couple years and i can’t remember the name now) but people called the top40 music from back then formulaic. they were convinced record labels had formulas to make their pop music stars. what do you think algorithms are? they’re feeding you trash.
again, stop getting your recommendations from algorithms and the world will open back up. get your recs from actual film or music geeks. go to your local record store, look at their wall of employee recs, or *gasp* talk to them and ask them.
> go to your local record store, look at their wall of employee recs, or gasp talk to them and ask them.
What local record store?
What local cinema?
What local bookshop?
Congrats, if you're resistant to addictive algorithms and same-day delivery convenience, but it's ignorant to deny the new baseline.
At least in Germany, book shops and (small) cinemas are artificially kept alive through regulations (e.g. Buchpreisbindung) and public funding. Theaters got that too, techno clubs not so much. Lucky are the ones who still got a nice deal on rent, because without a solid revenue, your new whatever local scene experiment won't be in the city. Then recently, conservative politicians also decided to attach ideological strings to the funding. What's a good book shop and what's a bad book shop gets intransparently decided by the domestic intelligence service now. The stories our times need will get you demonetized. As we speak, lobbyists are relentlessly trying to push the compliance machinery onto our devices, so we're not tempted by anything outside of commercial supervision either.
It's all converging towards the brave new mainstream. Pretending like all these trends are just fads is wilful ignorance. Media attention may come and go, but the insects remain dead, temperatures unprecedented and art compliant.
We are hardly in need of cyberpunk fiction anymore, tho.
https://apnews.com/article/independent-bookstores-expanding-...
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/apr/19/independent...
Granted, LotR and Dune were written in the 50's and 60's, respectively, with Star Wars following a decade later.
All I'm saying is that what is new depends on what generation you grow up in. And I suppose how much media you're exposed to. Speaking for myself, LotR was the second film I ever saw in the cinema so it was a whole new experience.
For the younger generations, these are old films, much like how idk, Spartacus and co was an old film for me.
tl;dr, the kids will be alright. Actually the kids also appreciate older media, there's a whole generation of late teenagers now rediscovering 2000's music / culture.
There is and always will be mainstream, niche, the unknown and everything in between. There was always very little new material and a lot of works just gained recognition when their zeitgeist was long overdue, too. I think experimentation is hard, and it's even harder to justify experimentation in the evolving economic climate.
Genres are meant to be collapsed, or rather they should blend and dissolve into each other. The earlier (and good) seasons of The Simpsons are a poster child when it comes to "flattening and duplicating old material". Almost every episode cites a movie or work of literature, and there was nothing wrong with it! It's part of why I understand the 90s as a cultural era of citations, and I had to grow up with that sentiment. It took me quite some time to understand that we moved past it.
Nowadays, we are fortunate enough that a lot of things from the past 10 decades have been digitized and are readily available on demand. That's amazing! Nothing is stopping me from asking myself some naive questions, like "What makes a good drama?" or "If Die Hard is considered to be a Christmas movie, why isn't Falling Down considered to be a summer movie?". I think there is still stuff to explore.
I'll just leave this unfinished thought with a recommendation to a niche movie I discovered recently: Sleep Has Her House (2017)[0]
You may wish to give On the Silver Globe a watch.
That's why the countries where cyberpunk flourished were wealthy ones
The roaring 90s were full of this: dark music exploring critical themes or things like depression and addiction, lots of social criticism, and edgy offensive humor. The mid to late 90s were an economic boom time for a broader segment of people and were optimistic in a way that’s hard to explain today.
I like to put it this way: it’s not that things were all better in the 90s. They weren’t. But people thought they were getting better.
Now people don’t want those things. They want light entertainment, either no criticism (the right) or only approved types via approved critical theories (the left), and offensive edgy stuff is out and may get you cancelled (which side cancels you depends on the content).
But as our society has become more stratified by wealth and the vast majority have become poorer, people no longer have the mental space to think deeply. They've come to love clear, simple answers. I interpret this as the world becoming too excessive. Because there's so much information that it's hard to even find meaningful content. Critical interpretation has also become difficult. Just look at AI. It's different today and different tomorrow, and for freelancers like me, it's like we have to deliver immediately.
There's material poverty, but I think mental poverty is more due to the pervasive FOMO, the fear of falling behind in the flood of information
As you said, it's 'only approved types via approved critical theories.' As people lose their margin for error, they also lose the capacity to consider others' perspectives.
I think you explained it better than I did.
The overall concepts and elements are still around in some way, but the specific combination and language that makes cyberpunk are gone. At the end I would say they were a result of their time, and time has changed, so not it's just nostalgia and retro.
...What? It's waste from expended munitions. The Ukranian war isn't a corporate war, it's a war between sovereign nations. The drones were produced by and bought from corporations (I assume) but the result of the arms race for better measures and countermeasures would have been the same if each country had produced its own gear.
>tech waste involving computers/internet/cybernetics
Again, something doesn't become cyberpunk just because it involves computers or electronics.
>war bad
I don't think cyberpunk is anti-war as a central feature. It's certainly compatible with that message, but you could write a cyberpunk story that is pro-war, as long that war is to counter the power of corporations.
>environmental degredation etc.
All in all, discarded fibers are more of a nuisance to people than to the environment, I think.
Citation needed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagner_Group_activities_in_Ukr...
What even is this argument? Why are you people wasting my and your time on this?
Cyberpunk as a concept is fairly subjective and subject to interpretation. Perhaps your conception of cyberpunk is more exclusive and prescriptive than others’? I wouldn’t interpret a difference of opinion about the tropes or ethos of cyberpunk in a normative way.
Just because folks see cyberpunk aspects in society or literature that you do not is not a contradiction of your own perceptions. It might be a case of prescriptivism vs descriptivism.
Does art imitate life, or does life imitate art, or both (or neither)? You seem to be saying that cyberpunk is only a literary genre, which is somewhat limiting the discussion when so many cyberpunk works have been adapted to other media, which then inspires other works which were never in written form to begin with. To limit your own discussion to written works is your prerogative, but it seems a needlessly narrow scope for the discussion of others who don’t share your view.
To say that we’re wasting our own time is to discount the fact that others are participating in the discussion in good faith for their own reasons. HN writ large isn’t a means to an end, HN and the individuals of HN are ends unto themselves.
What I said was that the Ukrainian war is not a corporate war. The composition or actions of the Wagner group are completely irrelevant. WG could be composed of anarchist hacker cyborgs who participate in armed conflicts to fund their struggle against what they perceive as a corporatocracy, and the Ukranian war would still not be a corporate war.
Reasonable people can disagree, as I alluded to above, but I wouldn’t say that disagreement on the points or in itself is pointless or wrong, which seems to be where we differ. Whether something is cyberpunk is in the eye of the beholder, a subjective experience in the reader of art and of literature and of history. I don’t see how you can say what something seems like to others, as that is to second guess their own experience of reality (or as mediated by fiction, in the the case of artistic works).
To me, the cyberpunk ethos can be summarized as high tech, low life. Utilizing literal convicts as frontline soldiers by Wagner in Ukraine seems to fit that description to a tee.
In light of the above combined with the routine usage of AI on all sides, the conflict in Ukraine as a whole seems to be a literal expression of “sustainable war” as depicted in Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045, which is widely regarded as a cyberpunk work.
https://breezewiki.com/Ghostintheshell/wiki/Sustainable_War
> In effect, the G4 nations went to war with each other in a "sustainable" manner managed by AIs: fighting deliberately avoided damaging major cities and essential infrastructure, mercenaries, and autonomous war machines were heavily used, and the goal of most battles was to destroy enemy structures, vehicles, and equipment while taking reasonable measures to capture rather than fatally harm human combatants when possible. In other words, the conflict would be sustainable as almost all losses could, in theory, be perpetually replaced by the military-industrial complex.
I won't let you move the goalposts.
Regarding your edit:
> I won't let you move the goalposts.
I don’t know what this statement is referring to, but I haven’t changed any of my positions regarding what I perceive as cyberpunk or whether or not I view the Ukraine war as corporate (and cyberpunk).
Perhaps you view the discussion as one where points are scored, but I don’t. I view the discussion as a collaborative enterprise where we both express ourselves and develop our own ideas in the context of a wider discussion.
If there’s something specific I said you would like me to address, please let me know, as I don’t know what you mean.
It’s a discussion board. I’m discussing the topic and trying to get to know what you think and believe, and thanks to your prompting, I got to know what I think and believe a little better myself. I don’t have any desire to disagree with you, as I don’t think that either one of us are making statements that have an objective quality to them, as the context is too subjective and subject to interpretation.
I don’t know enough about your definition of “corporate war” in the context of this thread, since you said we’re using different definitions, so maybe you could share a little bit about what that term means to you? What would it take to make the Ukrainian war a corporate war, to you? What are qualities of corporate war, and how would you or I know it when we see it? Can you think of some examples that meet your definition of corporate war, either in fiction or in real life?
didn't know that war was an integral part of the theme, or countering corpo powers. never read any manifest, though, ... the farce seemed less interesting than the chrome ...
I thought cyberpunk was about the illusion of not being a laissez-faire self-made instrument ...
If municipal emergency services in yout area don't cover ambulance rides, that subscription service might not be a bad idea.
But we've also learned that we don't need to change the body itself, when we can just enhance the tools we use. Smartphones are already seen as some sort of half-step towards humans becoming cyborgs. Similar have we now Exoskeletons, which are probably more practical than replacing a full limb.
As life begins to imitate art, we're met with a The Thick Of It type situation where the satire of reality is no longer applicable and would be further diminished by continuing it
> "Time and again, The Thick of It led and reality fell in behind."
This wasn't initially true of the word cyberpunk, but over the intervening years its become true, as cyberpunk has more and more denoted the future specifically as seen from the perspective of the 1980s and early 90's. Its become "retro-actively retro".
A recent one I enjoyed was Rabbit Trap, a modern take on faerie lore. It was polarizing and got poor reviews.
Years ago I adored a two season series called Hellier. I have a hard time describing this. Ghost hunting show for thinking people? You have to suspend disbelief but it reminded me of Primer in terms of a lot achieved on little budget. If you want to see some hipsters try to use transcranial magnetic stimulation to talk to aliens this is for you.
I’ve enjoyed some horror for its tendency to subvert tropes: hero to villain, villain is really hero, everybody dies, etc.
But yeah. I can only watch blockbusters if I’m in a certain kind of mood where I want light entertainment with no thought.
But I acknowledged (and dread a bit) that the audiovisual storytelling is such a strong force that any discussion about storytelling, even when specifically talking about literature/comics storytelling, is dominated by audiovisual references. Any creative writing workshop/course that include sci fi and fantasy genres will inevitably mention Star Wars as example for whichever technique. The more literary ones will mention some Oscar winning movie, etc.
Side note: if you need new stories, I've found a lot of weird and fun stuff to read on Royal Road.
Popular culture fiction is usually more like Pixar's "Structure stories with: Once upon a time… Every day… One day… Because of that… Until finally…". Real biographies are almost never like that. But almost the entire Marvel/Pixar/Lucasfilm output is about the Chosen One. None of the main characters work their way up.