released 15 may 05 / last mod 01 jun 07 / greg goebel / public domain
* Fans of the manga (Japanese comic) author and artist Masamune Shirow (MS) admire his imaginativeness and technical skills. One of his most popular series was GHOST IN THE SHELL (GITS), which involved Major Motoko Kusanagi of the Japanese Ministry of Internal Security Section 9, which operates as watchdog over other Japanese government bureaucracies and is sometimes called upon to do various dirty-trick operations.
Kusanagi is a very sophisticated combat cyborg who looks human but has many impressive capabilities. At the end of the first GITS series, she performed a melding with an artificial intelligence on the Net named the Puppet Master to become something of an Internet demigoddess. This scenario called out for a sequel, and after many years of laborious work the result has appeared as GITS II: MAN-MACHINE INTERFACE (MMI). Motoko Kusanagi and the Puppet Master have become a "free-lancer" named Motoko Aramaki, who directs a global network of intrigues, only to find that there is someone or something drawing her out in a particular direction.
The first thing that can be said about MMI is that the amount of effort invested in it clearly shows. This manga is literally stuffed with the most meticulous, detailed and imaginative artwork that could be conceived. The problem with MMI is that it makes almost no sense. I read through this thing a half-dozen times and I still couldn't follow what was happening, and after that I decided it wasn't worth bothering to try any longer.
It seems obvious that the author had something in mind when he wrote MMI. I had to finally conclude, however, that he was simply too inept a writer to communicate it to the reader. I judge him incompetent because there are scenes that I did figure out that involve Motoko Aramaki jumping from one mechanical body to another in a different locale, and the author does absolutely nothing to help the reader make the jump. It would have been simple to have included some overbar text to say that a character was a remote body in, say, Luzon or Hong Kong, instead of making the reader sort things out. The author also could have provided technical sidebars on various elements of the story that would have given readers a big leg up, but he never bothers.
I think Masamune Shirow deserves the David Lynch Award For Self-Indulgent Writing for MMI. An overall judgement on this item is very difficult, since from the implementation standpoint it deserves five stars, while from the writing standpoint it deserves one. So I split the difference and give him a middle grade. The pity of it is that the guy really does have some brilliant ideas in his head. He just needs to hire a partner who can hit him over the head with a mallet when he's not making any sense.