A few months back, I bought the new reprint of Ghost in the Shell from Dark Horse/Studio Proteus. I tried reading it through, and kind of got bogged down (for a variety of reasons) about half-way through.

I finally picked it back up over the past week and powered my way through the whole thing. I feel I have to mention at the outset--I haven't read any other work by Masamune Shirow, and most importantly, I haven't seen the MOVIE of Ghost in the Shell.

The book is possibly one of the most difficult comics reads I've ever seen, ranking up there with From Hell and Cerebus the Aardvark. Like both of those, this book elevates its subject matter into what amounts, toward the end, to be a nearly complete personal philosophy of existance that touches very sincerely on the author's personal vision of cosmology.

It's a stunningly sprawling read, with great characters that I got really familiar with after a while. Like I said, it's not an easy book to read--all too often, the book falls back on hard science and fanservice-type art when it wasn't entirely that necessary, and occasionally the book comes across as a combination of reading a porno magazine and a science textbook.

I have the first issue of Man Machine Interface, the sequel. I'll give it a shot, but examining the artwork, I'm not sure if it's something I'll get into as well. It honestly just seems too much like Shirow's given up on doing the type of art that he was known for in books like Appleseed and others. I'm not sure about shelling out the $24.95 for the collected version, though (less, actually, about 17 bucks with my employee discount) and in some ways approaching it in individual issue format (at 4 bucks per) is cheaper in its own way, being more spread-out.