alt Hacker NewsCyberpunk Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels
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Coincidentally, there is a new Ghost in the Shell anime that's premiering now on Amazon Prime Video. It's animation style and mood are closely aligned with the original 1989 manga, which is to say it's more cartoonish and light-hearted. I prefer the more adult oriented content the franchise was putting out up until about 2006, but the new anime series gives me hope that we might eventually see a follow-up animation of Shirow Masamune's Man/Machine Interface - what was once considered to be Ghost in the Shell 2 before Mamuro Oshii created Innocence.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260712230824/https://shellzine...
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.
It might be skirting the edges of what is considered cyberpunk since it has Mecha elements but Patlabor is a fantastic manga/series that should have been included in this list [1]
In Italy (and sometimes abroad, I recall dark horse translated it in English at some point) Nathan Never has been publishing as a monthly comic for a few decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Never
Not all stories are cyberpunk, but many are.
Some are great.
I wasn't even aware there were Blade Runner comics, that's awesome.
Anime counterpart to this article: https://shellzine.net/cyberpunk-anime/
This is a bit of an idiosyncratic list. Two of my favorite additions from my own youth: Hard Boiled by Frank Miller and Geof Darrow and Batman: Digital Justice. The latter now reads like a bit of a corny cash grab for the early '90s cyber fad, but I still love the time capsule of some if its art.
I wonder if Pluto by Naoki Urasawa would be considered Cyberpunk? Even if it isn't, it's a must read.
No Judge Dredd (which dates back to 1977) or anything else from 2000 AD?
Rich Veitch, he and Alan Moore. As Moore would later write:
"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."It's interesting to me that most cyberpunk manga isn't Japanese cyberpunk.
Worth noting that Cyberpunk as a genre was at least intended to be a dystopia.
Blame!'s manga style is the most unique and it created unforgettable atmosphere not replicated from what I know.
The one I'd highlight from the list is Hiroki Endo's Eden: It's an Endless World, it's my favorite manga. It's beautifully drawn and incredibly grounded in tone and oddly relevant.
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.
So much of this space has been collapsed into homogenized entertainment. Nowadays, by the time a child is ten years old they have seen every form of the hero’s journey in the cartoons they watch, to the degree where there are tropes and nods to source material or even sometimes derivatives of source. Sci fi, fantasy and other genres are blended in as hooks because cartoons have to keep viewership and eye balls, so they throw everything they can find at it.
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.