Masamune Shirow’s Intron Depot 1 Review
As a manga-obsessed kid in the early 1990s, the art of Masamune Shirow had an enormous impact on my adolescence. In my mind, the artists who defined what manga and anime were included Shirow himself, Akira’s Katsuhiro Otomo, Ranma 1/2’s Rumiko Takahashi, Battle Angel Alita’s Yukito Kishiro, and Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind’s Hayao Miyazaki. Dominion Tank Police was one of the first anime I ever rented from the video store without direct parental supervision (I also rented some far more… uh… “adult” titles too…) My friends and I used to take turns renting every single “Manga Video” we could find, then using a double VHS deck, we duplicated them onto blank tapes to keep and share around our peer group. It was a low tech, low effort, localised piracy ring, and I feel no shame. We were poor! None of us could afford to buy video tapes regularly back then.
The UK newsstand magazine/anthology Manga Mania ran Akira and Dominion together for a significant chunk of its run, and from there I tracked down everything Shirow via my local shady comic store, that stank of its proprietor’s horrendous cigars. I’m sure some of my old Appleseed TPBs still harbour that baked-in stench. At that time, Toren Smith’s Studio Proteus was tasked with localising Shirow’s complex work for English-speaking audiences — first via Eclipse Comics, and then following their untimely demise, Dark Horse took over. Eventually, I managed to track down the entirety of Shirow’s English-translated publications — all four volumes of Appleseed, plus Dominion, Black Magic, and even the incredibly esoteric Orion.
One book that always remained tantalisingly out of reach was Shirow’s 1991 art book Intron Depot 1. I saw photos of it in magazines, but had no idea how on Earth to import a Japanese-language coffee table book. What was particularly enticing was the fact it contained multiple pages with images from the at-the-time untranslated Ghost in the Shell manga, which wouldn’t come to the West until 1995. Despite my pining, kid me did not have the resources to fulfill all of my manga-related desires.
Fast-forward 30 years or so, and although I’ve allegedly “grown up”, my interests really haven’t changed all that much. Since I’ve been writing a lengthy multi-article Ghost in the Shell retrospective series, I’ve used it as an excuse to finally acquire my own copy of Intron Depot 1. It really wasn’t that difficult — I found it very swiftly on ebay for around £20 from a UK seller with 20 copies for sale. This was when I noticed they were also selling a multitude of other Shirow art books… For the sake of my marriage, dear reader, I closed that browser window immediately upon paying for my one, single book.
My ease of acquisition of Intron Depot 1 leads me to assume that the book must still be in print, or at the very least had a recent re-print. That’s pretty good going for an art book published 33 years ago. So what does the book actually contain? Well, surprisingly, it’s bilingual — Studio Proteus was involved with the book’s production so that it could be more easily sold internationally. Every single artwork comes with its own explanatory annotation courtesy of Shirow himself — both in Japanese and in English. It really is invaluable to learn about Shirow’s own (often very self-deprecating) thoughts on his process. Intron Depot 1 features most of his full-colour work for all of his early manga, from between 1981 to 1991, before he started to heavily rely on digital tools and image processing.
Of Intron Depot 1’s 226 illustrations, 193 are in full colour. Of these, there are 43 Appleseed, 10 Black Magic, 6 Black Magic M-66, 19 Dominion, 17 Orion and 39 Ghost in the Shell images. Shirow removed 34 Ghost in the Shell colour images that he could have included, because he felt including every single one of that (at the time) recently-published volume’s colour pages in Intron Depot 1 would devalue the source, and he was probably right. It’s quite a large book, certainly compared to the average manga tankobon, or even western comic trade paperback. It’s good for seeing details in the larger images, though it does sometimes mean certain pages are crammed full of a bunch of smaller, shrunken images.
To be fair, most of the Ghost in the Shell art included in Intron Depot 1 is easily found in the graphic novel itself, or on the cover of Dark Horse’s original floppy issues from 1995. If you want larger versions of these, then perhaps Intron Depot 1 is worth getting. Shirow’s comments on the images are all quite interesting though, so may be worth the price of admission for big fans. (I am quite happy with it personally, and I already have copies of most of these images elsewhere.)
Lesbian ménage à trois fans might be interested to know that the controversial sex scene from the first GitS manga volume’s chapter Junk Jungle is partially reprinted here, in smaller format, after being censored in the vast majority of English-language editions. It’s missing one page of heavily-oiled, improbably-proportioned female bodily writhing, however. It adds nothing to GitS’ story and comes across as lurid and unnecessarily voyeuristic anyway.
Apart from a handful of work-in-progress images, there weren’t a whole lot of GitS-related pictures in the book that were fully new to me. There’s a cool poster at the front which I suppose I could surgically extract from the book and put on my bedroom wall, but that would 1) destroy my nice book, and 2) probably piss off my wife. My days of proudly displaying buxom Shirow women on my bedroom wall ended in my teens. I had a huge poster of Dominion’s prodigiously busty cat girls Anna Puma and Uni Puma on my wall in the 1990s, primarily to scandalise my very prim and straight-laced grandmother when she came to stay. There was also a terrifying glow-in-the dark X-Files poster she made me remove because it unnerved her so much…
I’d say Intron Depot 1 is much more valuable for its collection of otherwise rare images of Appleseed, Dominion, Black Magic, and Orion. Many of these pictures never made it over here — Japanese volume covers that inexplicably weren’t used for the US editions, or at least not the editions I own. Some of these pictures are really beautiful, and I greatly prefer Shirow’s early analogue work before he became a slave to plasticky and garish computer colouring. There’s also a bunch of technical information, especially about Appleseed’s Landmate mechas, so fans of the Appleseed Databook and Hypernotes should feel right at home here.
Intron Depot 1 is a handsome volume, and I think it’s really good value for the list price of 2333 yen. That’s around fifteen US dollars at the current incredibly low exchange rate. If you’re a fan of Shirow’s artwork, it’s definitely worth picking up if you can find a copy. As a coffee table book, it’s not designed for sitting and reading from cover to cover. It’s good to pick up and leaf through for a few minutes at a time. It might be worth considering who your house guests might be before leaving it on your actual coffee table though, considering the not-insignificant number of fairly racy images and well-oiled, shiny feminine curves contained within!
Intron Depot 1
Written and illustrated by: Masamune Shirow
JP Publisher: Seishinsa
JP publication date: 17th July 1992
Pages: 150
Languages: Bilingual Japanese and English
ISBN 13: 978–4878920110
