People will tell you that The Ghost in the Shell is a single story, about a cyborg cop in a complex future Japan and her pursuit of a mysterious AI called The Puppeteer. They are lying to you.

Oh, that thread is here, and the very last installment here sees the conclusion of that story. It’s a plausible lie, like all the best ones.

But Ghost in the Shell is three hundred and fifty pages of comics, across eleven long chapters, and most of those chapters are individual episodes of our heroine murdering lots of people because the government tells her to. Puppeteer comes in during one of those murder sprees earlier in the book, and then returns in the aftermath of yet another kill-that-guy mission for something like an ending.

There is a lot of pseudo-philosophical talk about brains and bodies, and a whole lot of skiffy bafflegab — which I think was not translated as crisply and clearly as it should have been — about the cyberpunk details of the technology here. But that’s not nearly as unique as Ghost‘s boosters pretend it is — or as coherent.

Of course, we do have to remember that Ghost started serialization in 1989 and was collected in 1991 — cyberpunk wasn’t new at that point, true (in fact, I think “Vincent Omniveritas” had declared it dead several years before), but Ghost showed that cyberpunk was going global and infiltrating new media. If you think of it as an ’80s cyberpunk comic, Ghost is pretty good — it has a complex, lived-in world, lots of interesting technology turned to criminal and/or destructive purposes, and a deeply jaundiced view of anyone in power. Masamune Shirow might have been working on the other side of the world, in a different language, and a different medium than the first wave of cyberpunks, but he could see what was important in that mode and turn it into the stories he wanted to tell.

The street finds its own use for things, as they say.

In this case, it’s the story of a cyborg mass-murderess, who is our heroine because she kills people the government aims her at, and we still thought that was good enough in the ’80s. (She does get in trouble near the end for her bloody work, but only because she was unfortunate enough to do it where a camera could see it — the killing itself is never questioned for a second, by anyone in the book.)

As you might guess, I found it a lot to swallow. Oh, not that a government would have a secret assassin — that’s traditional enough in this kind of story. Maybe a bit that she’s part of a big squad with a code number ending in nine — explicitly shown to be one of a series of similar teams with mostly non-overlapping opportunities for mass murder  — which implies a level of bloodthirstiness that seems unlikely to be sustained for very long, even in a country as full of targets as Japan. Mostly because Major Motoko Kusanagi never really becomes a person: she’s a collection of standard manga reactions and poses, there to be in the middle of the action and do Cool Stuff. Her entire personality is “dangerous sexy manga chick.”

Again, 1989 was another world — Japan doubly so, manga triply so. But, coming to Ghost in the Shell now, it does not look terribly impressive.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

I should probably stop writing about Saga through the lens of my own expectations. I want it to be a single story that started with the birth of one child in this space-fantasy universe, and to have it end well in a way that wraps up that story. But it’s becoming more and more clear that creator Brian K. Vaughan instead sees Saga as a universe to tell stories in, and that those stories will all be somewhat related to that central family.

So I’m looking for a unity that isn’t here, and will never be here: Saga will run as long as people keep buying it (or until artist Fiona Staples decides she wants to do something else; I can’t imagine this continuing without her), and it will be a normal comic-book, full of issues that are separate stories or add up to an “arc” of three or six issues. Eventually, it will stop, for whatever reason, but the whole of Saga is not a single story and there’s no way to make it one at this point.

I’m sad about this, because there are enough serialized adventures in comics already and not enough stories, but no one asked me. I do hope I can draw a line under than thought here, and leave it buried: it’s not a useful framework for looking at Saga going forward from here. (And I see I keep saying a variation of the same thing every time I write about Saga, which must be tedious on your end: see my posts on volumes one , two , three , four, five , six , and especially seven for my repeated cataloging of pointless objections.)

So: here’s Saga, Vol. 8 , collecting another chunk of six issues. The first of these even seems to be an attempt at an introduction for new readers, that old standby of serialized comics. Let me just note that “new-reader friendly” is only important in a medium where going back to the beginning is infeasible or impossible: Netflix has built a big business on letting people binge from Season One Episode One.

Anyway, this volume is the story of an abortion. Well, it’s described as an abortion, repeatedly, but the baby is dead in the womb — in a mystical, woo-woo kind of way that means that child is also a ghost running around nearby — which means the medical procedure is actually quite distinct from an abortion. One suspects Vaughan might be trying to make points, or just be provocative for the sake of being provocative. The big events at the end of the last volume left that child dead in the womb, and apparently it’s not simple to just get him out. (If anything were simple, it wouldn’t be Saga.)

I find it harder and harder to write about the Saga volumes at this point: I’m trying not to give away who needs an abortion, even though that’s blindingly obvious to any semi-serious reader of the series. But I feel like the plot details of part forty-three of an umpty-ump part story shouldn’t be splashed around; I think most readers will want to get here under their own power. And, more seriously, Saga is becoming more and more soap-opera-ish with each issue: I forget precisely which TV-head is the guy running around in this issue (Count something? the Duc of NBC? Crown Prince Cyborg MCMLXXVI?), and I can’t remember where Lying Cat got to (she’s not in here at all), and I’m only vaguely invested in the some-other-horrible-person-has-captured-The-Will-and-has-now-learned-our-heroes-exist-oh-woe plotline.

Look, these are sturdy, well-built characters. They inhabit a big, complicated universe. Staples can draw any damn thing Vaughan can throw at her, and make it look both real and retroactively obvious. Many of the relationships here are ones readers care about and are invested in. But Saga seems to be still proliferating, and the initial burst of energy that was so enticing is slowly expanding into that big universe, like the Big Bang, and is cooling and becoming less excited as it goes.

Hmm. I guess I can’t stop talking about the same issues with Saga every damn time. Oh, well. Saga has gone from being a thunderbolt of energy and passion to a solid, entertaining space adventure comic. It’s still very nice, but it’s not what it was.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

At some point, writing about an ongoing series becomes gibberish to the uninformed and spoilers to the slightly behind. (Maybe not both at exactly the same moment, but both eventually.) I’d like to think that can still be a long way off, that I can spin out interesting things to say about the fourth volume collecting a SFnal comic, but it’s not me that will be the judge of that.

A lot of plot has come before we hit the first page of Descender, Vol. 4: Orbital Mechanics — by the way, does that title feel like it’s just a random skiffy-sounding reference? asking for a friend — full of character and incident and shocking revelations and worldbuilding and all that good stuff. (See my posts on the first and second and third volumes for more details of the good stuff.)

We’re also into serious split-the-party multi-threaded plotting here: as we begin, TIM-21 is running away from TIM-22 on Machine Moon, while Telsa and Quon are trying to escape that same place, seeing as how they’re meat-based organisms and the robots take a dim view of that. Meanwhile, Andy has reunited with his now-cyborged ex-girlfriend Effie and is back on 21’s trail. That sounds like they’re all going to get together, doesn’t it?

But no — writer Jeff Lemire has plenty more complications to work through in this space-opera universe, so any tearful (or gunfire-filled) reunions will have to wait for a while. We’re still in frying-pan-into-fire mode here, as nearly all of the characters we’re supposed to like are in worse positions by the end of the book. I have to admit I wonder how long Lemire can keep that up: eventually, everybody is going to get killed or the last-second escapes will get silly. But, for now, there’s enough stuff going on in this universe to keep it all plausible.

Artist Dustin Nguyen is still chugging along here — I particularly like his use of color in this book to indicate mood and environment. It’s a seemingly small thing that can be very effective, particularly when one person is making all of the art.

I still hope that Descender has a specific story to tell, with a real ending — that it’s not going to just spin out complications for as long as people will buy it. The only way to tell that will be through time; we’ll have to wait and see. For now, this is still an excellent space opera in comics form.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.