>>1859
And that is Neuro-Hard. The thing is oozing with Shirow's noted idiosyncrasies, it's got a great look to it, we've got SF, space travel, colony worlds, a space witch, giant wasps and more on display and no fucking idea what's going on beyond what we can glean from the images.
It's also clear now to me why this didn't get an English release. There's not enough to make up a single volume, so anyone selling it would either have to be marketing it to Shirow fanboys as a cheap copy or bundle it in with an artbook. Add to the sheer intensity of the language on display and Toren Smith's unfortunate early death, it would be hard to get a translator to do this justice, especially when you no longer have someone who knows Shirow and so can just phone him up to ask him what the hell is going on.
Ultimately, it's a lot of what I like about Shirow's work bundled tightly together here and having finally looked over it all in some detail, I really do wish it did get translated and continued. One thing I will note however is that it seemed to me that Shirow seemed to be doing a lot more focused on exploration or such in this period, moving away from the military SF techno-thriller style of previous works (that one story about the underwater exploration coming to mind first and foremost). What would have come out of all of this had he continued making actual comics and works rather than being paid for ideas and making erotica of questionable quality? Who knows, but I think we've missed out on a body of work that really could have been quite special.
Also not-Deunan is cute.
