Comic-Con 2016: Kodansha To Release Deluxe Edition Of Ghost In The Shell

To coincide with the release of the live-action film, Kodansha plans to release a deluxe edition of the classic manga Ghost in the Shell.

For many an American anime fan, Ghost in the Shell holds as important a place in history as classics such as Akira and Ninja Scroll. It was the first anime to reach our shores that went beyond the usual trapping of shows such as Robotech and Star Blazers to demonstrate what anime was really capable of.

Since then, Ghost in the Shell has become an anime institution, with the story being retold in a pair of anime television series as well as numerous films. And soon fans will get to see the characters come to life in a live-action film starring Scarlett Johansson due in 2017.

Like the anime, the Ghost in the Shell manga also functioned as a gateway for many comic book fans into the world of Japanese comics. Originally published by Dark Horse in 1995 in the standard American comic format (the pages read from left-to-right), it brought a whole new audience to the work of Masamune Shirow. Along with Marvel’s publication of Akira, it was some of the first manga to be presented in English and available in comic book stores.

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The original manga and its two follow-ups, Ghost in the Shell 2: Man-Machine Interface and Ghost in the Shell 1.5: Human-Error Processor, have been in and out of print over the years with the license currently sitting with Kodansha, who last published the books in 2009 and 2010 respectively.

Announced at San Diego Comic-Con this past weekend, Kodansha is preparing to publish a deluxe edition of all three volumes of Ghost in the Shell in 2017 to coincide with the release of the live-action film.

These new hardcover editions will include, for the first time, the original right-to-left reading format as well the original Japanese sound effects. These will also be the uncensored versions, which have not seen print since Dark Horse held the license and last published them in 2004.

For manga purists, this is something they have long been asking for. While today it is standard for manga to be published in the original Japanese format, it wasn’t always that way. Of the handful of manga that were published in the late 90s and early 2000s, Ghost in the Shell is one of the last to be “fixed” and printed the way it was intended to be seen.

While Kodansha hasn’t announced a date when they will go on sale, the Ghost in the Shell movie is set to open in March of next year so you would think it should be around the same time.

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The Ghost in the Shell manga is considered a cyberpunk classic for a reason. It will be nice to be able to read them for the first time in the format they were originally published to get ready for the film.

Now if I can just get a corrected version of Urusei Yatsura, I will be a happy guy.