No.1842
Neuro-Hard; the final pre-Kobe Shirow work and the one we've had the least exposure to in the West.
Apparently set in the future where space travel is common enough that a flying space city ends up on a planet covered with giant wasps; another work highlighting Shirow's less recognised fascination with insects.
I'll dump the scans we have of it. Let's discuss possible translation options, the designs and art and generally give this a bit of presence on this board. It definitely deserves its own thread here.
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No.1843
And showing the second heroine, I think. Has the air of being a bit of a beaurcratic sort doesn't she?
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No.1844
>>1843
The order of the pages is a little off on this post.
Our cast also includes ay lmaos in the form of literal greys and some elf/catgirl here. We also get some studies of wasp anatomy here.
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No.1845
And onto issue 2; which seems to actually be the real first issue. In this we see not-deunan's power armour, glasses gal getting flustered and angry electronic old men.
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No.1846
Moving on, we see that the wasps have fucked up not-Deunan, glasses girl is feeling suicidal and everything seems to be getting quite tense.
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No.1847
Onto chapter 3! In which we get a determined looked Deunan, a lot of nice SD work and an airship! In extreme detail and all.
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No.1848
And here they explore what seems to be the remnants of a human or some other city, there'sa lot of people looking serious and dark haired gal gets Eaters of Sin'd!
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No.1849
>>1848
Or was it eaters of filth? Eh, same thing.
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No.1850
Onto chapter 4! Dark hair gal recovers from her experience. Not-Deunan opens up a pot of grey aliens and we get a cool space fighter plane thing.
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No.1851
Bit of a creature feature this time. We've got more varieties of aliens, mermaids and all kinds of weirdness. We also have what is potentially a smol gal but could also be a hologram or such. And a map of something to boot.
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No.1852
Given how much text is in there, the certainty of Shirow techo-babble and the lack of general interest, the only way we're going to get to read this anytime soon is if we commission someone to translate it and I doubt it's gonna be cheap.
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No.1853
>>1844
>>1850
get a load of these fuckin ayylmaos
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No.1854
>>1850
oh shit, there's a space witch there as well!
What is she up to
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No.1855
>>1848
>>1849
It is them indeed, they can taste all the bad karma emanating from that grumpy chick
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No.1856
>>1854
Just having a look in at the goings on in Newport, friendly and all.
>>1854
You're right! I should have noticed that and commented on it. Knowing Shirow some kinda karmic esper magitech stuff that's probably super cool if we could read about it. Nice sorceress robes and all on her.
>>1855
Makes you wonder whether or not they're some kind of alien species that existed throughout the Yamato Empire or maybe emerge when there's loads of karmic taoist magic being thrown around the place.
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No.1857
Anyway, onto chapter 6! Looks like someone is being scanned, or perhaps teleported? Regardless we seem to have a big headed alien thing hovering around the place pointing things out to people. Seems like there's a ton of aliens in this setting beyond what we've seen already. They also seem to have found some kind of giant wasp hive (I seem to recall Shirow mentioning in one of his essays admiring a wasp hive being built or something along those lines). After that, a sumptuous dinner, grumpy chick is getting chewed out over the vid screen and then more maps. Followed by not-Deunan seeming to be getting along with one of the wasps. Lots of interesting stuff going on.
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No.1858
Chapter 7 and they've found some kind of… blob thing growing in the ruins of the clearly human (or humanesque) city. It also seems like Dark Hair has had an attitude readjustment from the look on her face and the pointing. Not-Deunan continues her life with wasps with what seems like an explanation of what could be their language or movement signals. There's various kitting up and stuff, elf gal is confused by flowers from Blackie Lawless and we find what seems to be a organic spaceship thing with an… interesting appendage.
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No.1859
And now the conclusion! According to zimmerit, there's a bit of mystery as to why this ended when it ended. This chapter came out in later 1994, which was before the 1995 Quake, but also was the last chapter published for Neuro-Hard. It seems to be that Shirow just was not hitting deadlines at all and was being months late with his work at this point. Whether it was due to his perfectionist nature, working on other projects (Appleseed 5, Dominion No More Noise, etc) or just how he did things, we don't know. Well, at least I don't know.
Anyway, let's look at what we get.
Our intrepid adventurers seem to be heading inside the giant blob, setting out in powered armour. Dark haired gal is worried by something as they fly near and cat-elf also looks distressed. It seems to me like the blob is some kind of wasp nest, which we get a very nice map of, showing it laid out a lot like an Asian Hornet's nest with dark haired gal looking quite annoyed inside. In fact, is that actually her on the bridge earlier? Hard to tell. Could be a clone or such, it's hard to take things off the table here without more info. The greys march behind not-Deunan, there's an argument and back to the city ship which is where we leave the story.
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No.1860
>>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.
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No.1861
>>1852
Yeah, I always wondered why no one's taken a crack at it, and then just looking at the first page you can see exactly why. There's probably a full normal manga chapter's worth of Japanese text on that page alone.
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No.1862
And before I forget here's one last piece of art showing off the uniform in colour, a very nice SF spess uniform, with a pleasing assymetrical embellishment (I once knew what that was called on a uniform but the name eludes me now), a sword and a wasp.
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