Appleseed (1985)
Appleseed is a 1985 cyberpunk title by Masamune Shirow.
Four volumes, one artist doing both jobs, and a city named for the seat of the Greek gods. Masamune Shirow wrote and drew Appleseed between 1985 and 1989, and the run stops there, four books, no continuation.
Deunan Knute and Briareos Hecatonchires serve in ESWAT, and Olympus is the ground they cover. Shirow builds the series the way he builds most of his work: cyberpunk hardware and mecha on the surface, with politics, philosophy and sociology arguing underneath. The action pages and the talking pages carry equal weight. Readers who want a firefight get one. Readers who want to sit with the question of how a city should be governed, and by whom, get that too.
The adaptation trail runs long: an original video animation, three feature films, a 13-episode television series and two video games, each taking a different cut at the same material. The 1985 manga stays the compact version, the place where Shirow's ideas arrive first and least filtered.
Similar titles
Explore Appleseed guides
A few thoughts on Appleseed
Ghost in the Shell is the obvious next stop, the same balance of armor, gunplay and long arguments about who runs the machine, pitched slower and colder than any Appleseed film. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners covers the opposite end, street level and loud, full of the life a city like Olympus exists to manage. For reading, Pluto, Vol. 1 takes the question of what a manufactured person is owed and runs it as a detective story, and Neuromancer gives you the prose cyberpunk Shirow was working alongside, published a year before volume one. Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix, also 1985, matches the political half of Appleseed better than the screen versions manage. For the era in your ears, Symphonic Suite AKIRA is the sound of the same late-80s boom in Japanese science fiction.