The History of the Ghost in the Shell Manga
A quarterly serial in a pirate-themed side magazine became the defining cyberpunk manga.
Ghost in the Shell began in an unlikely place: Young Magazine Kaizokuban, a special-issue offshoot of Kodansha’s Weekly Young Magazine, where it appeared roughly every three months from May 1989 into late 1990. Kodansha collected the chapters as a single tankobon on October 2, 1991, a large, expensive book for its day at ¥971 before tax, with 64 of its pages in color. Shirow returned to the world twice: chapters published between 1991 and 1996 later formed 1.5: Human-Error Processor, and a new storyline serialized in 1997 became 2: Man-Machine Interface.
THE TITLE ITSELF
Two names, one bookGhost in the Shell
Shirow’s own title, a nod to Arthur Koestler’s “ghost in the machine,” was the name he submitted and wanted on the book from the start.
Kōkaku Kidōtai
His editor preferred the Japanese title, roughly “Mobile Armored Riot Police,” and the compromise stuck: the Japanese books carry both, the English title riding as the subtitle that eventually took over the world.
THE BOOK BY NUMBERS
Kodansha colophon data346 pages
The page count recorded for the original manga: a single-volume epic at a time when manga lived or died by open-ended serialization.
First printing: October 5, 1991
The colophon of the first edition records its first printing three days after the retail release date, priced at ¥971 plus tax under the KC Deluxe imprint.