Masamune Shirow’s PIECES Gem 01 [The Ghost in the Shell Data +α] Art Book Review
Published in 2014 to mark Ghost in the Shell’s 25th anniversary (the first manga chapter was published in March 1989), this small hardback volume was the second of author Masamune Shirow’s art books to include a significant proportion of GitS material. The first, Intron Depot 1, was published in 1991, and for many Western fans it was the first look at Shirow’s then latest series. It took four years for Dark Horse to publish an English edition of the manga, which was then followed later in 1995 by Mamoru Oshii’s movie adaptation.
In the 23 years between Intron Depot 1 and Pieces Gem 01, Ghost in the Shell had gone from a quarterly-published manga serial to a multimedia behemoth, spanning anime movies, TV shows, OVAs, spin-off and sequel manga, and even several console games. Shirow himself eventually moved away from producing manga, following his final three solo manga volumes Dominion Conflict 1, GitS 1.5: Human Error Processor, and GitS 2: Man-Machine Interface. Part of this was due to the catastrophic 1995 Kobe earthquake, in which he lost much of his work (particularly badly affecting his work on Neuro Hard). Also, due to undefined health issues and a need to care for his elderly, infirm father, Shirow found manga production too arduous, so instead focused mainly on illustration work.
Throughout the 1990s, 2000s, and beyond, Shirow lent his design ethos to multiple OVAs and video games, plus he also had what sounds like quite significant input into the GitS: Stand Alone Complex TV show. His artbook output remained quite prodigious — the Intron Depot series is up to 11 now, the Pieces series has 12 volumes, while he has also illustrated multiple other volumes. Apart from Pieces Gem 01–03, most of these other books feature art not directly related to his manga, and may be of limited interest to his manga fans. Shirow’s work is often rather erotic in nature, though thankfully Pieces Gem 01 is relatively restrained in subject matter.
For the Western Shirow fan, Pieces Gem 01 is available to buy either physically for around $20, or as an ebook for around $10. While hardback, it’s much smaller than Intron Depot 1, and only around 3/5ths the page count. There’s comparatively much more text, but unfortunately this isn’t a dual language book like its predecessor, plus the text itself doesn’t seem to directly relate to the pictures at all. I used Google image translate to get an idea of what the text was about, and it seems to be a series of lengthy, rather rambly(!) interviews with Shirow about various aspects of his career. He describes his involvement with the various iterations of the anime, including his displeasure with certain aspects of the industry! It’s a shame the machine translation is so hard to follow, as some of these anecdotes would be much more enlightening with a proper human translation.
Many of the images are from the Man-Machine Interface era, with quite a few having been used as Dark Horse comic covers here in the West. A nice touch is the inclusion of images from the Cyberdelics poster collection, a 1997 foil-embossed edition exclusive to Japan, though some of the images look to have been re-used for Dark Horse’s Cybergirls Portfolio (2000). This book is likely the only realistic prospect for most fans to own copies of these images. In typical Shirow fashion, they’re all very beautiful, heavily stylised, and very shiny. For me, Shirow’s artwork was the very embodiment of 1980s and 1990s science fiction manga, and his work had a huge impact on me as a young adolescent.
I guess whether this volume will appeal to an individual English-speaker depends on how much you don’t mind staring at pretty pictures without context. The paper quality is very nice and shiny, but the small size means this is less of a must-buy than a coffee table-sized book would have been. Shirow’s art is so detailed that it really needs a larger page size to do it justice. I tend to be something of an obsessive collector, so I’m just happy to own this, but I don’t think it’s an essential buy for all but the most obsessive Shirow nerd. If you can read Japanese, then that may upgrade this to more of a priority purchase.
The Ghost in the Shell artbook thing has turned into something of a swirling vortex of doom for me, as the folks on Reddit and other fan sites keep pointing out books I’ve never heard of before. Therefore, I’ve tracked down a copy of Russian artist Ilya Kuvshinov’s design work for the unfairly maligned SAC_2045 TV show. I plan to take a look at that one next. Sometimes being a Shirow fan can cause a significant drain on one’s finances… Thanks for reading, and I’ll leave you with a few more of my photographs of Pieces Gem 01 for your perusal. Apologies for my fairly terrible photography skills!
PIECES Gem 01 [The Ghost in the Shell Data +α]
Artist: Masamune Shirow
JP Publisher: Seishinsha
JP Publication: 13th November, 2014
Pages: 80
Dimensions: 15.7 x 1.2 x 21.6 cm
Language: Japanese
ISBN-13: 978–4–87892–396–8
