By Shirow Masamune
Dark Horse, 182 pp.
Rating: 14 +

Now available for the first time in an unflipped format is the first volume of Shirow Masamune’s cyberpunk epic, and first major series, Appleseed: The Promethean Challenge. For years, the various nations of the world have been at war. Most of the old imperial powers are in ruins, and those that remain are suffering from the after effects of the war. A new power emerges on the international scene: Aegis, an organization based on the artificial island of Olympus. Aegis’s goal is to unite the world and lead it out of the long night which has held it for years. Meanwhile, in the remains of an isolated city, Briareos and Deunan, two soldiers unaware of the war’s end, are about to find themselves forcibly relocated to the utopia of Olympus. Things are never as simple as they seem, however.

Despite being twenty years old the artwork in Appleseed still looks amazing. The mecha designs, the weaponry, the look and feel of the city Olympus, all are fantastic and heavily detailed. Shirow’s fetish for technology really shines through with his mecha and vehicle designs. Unlike some sci-fi artists, Shirow manages to make the mecha and cyborgs look both cool and functional. The designs are also supported by his brief tangents into the nitty-gritty of how certain things operate. These brief bits of exposition focusing on engine torque and building material make tangible things that are normally left to one’s imagination. While his action sequences lack the fluidity of his later work, they still manage to be exciting and intense, if a tad hard to follow at times.

Like the artwork, Appleseed’s plot is a bit on the dense side. It’s tangled and full of various political intrigues with lapses into philosophical ponderings about man’s relationship with the environment and technology, what it means to be human, and so forth. Likewise, the dialogue can be vague and cluttered with techno babble, but it never overwhelms, and adds flavor to the setting and characters.

The central plot poses an interesting question: is there such thing as a utopia? Olympus, constructed during the war by far-thinking scientists, was designed to lead and unite the planet in its reconstruction efforts. To accomplish this, Olympus and Aegis are both run by specially designed clones constructed to mediate, guide, and lead the world away from the edge of destruction. Unfortunately, there seems to be some internal friction between Athena, the director of administration, and the Council of Elders, a group of advisors who help set the course of Aegis and Olympus. While the exact reason for the friction remains a mystery, it involves a list of select individuals who The Council have been bringing to live in Olympus, a list which includes Deunan and Briareos. The two newcomers quickly find themselves entangled in a complex web of politics and manipulations which ultimately result in a terrorist attack led by humans unwilling to hand over their fate to the hands of the clones. While the story isn’t quite as confusing as something like MPD Psycho, it certainly has enough subplots to loose oneself in. While some of the storylines are resolved in this volume, others continue in subsequent volumes, with some of the larger questions–such as how Deunan and Briareos are important in the overall scheme of things–left to open for future volumes to explore and explain.

If there’s any drawback to this book it’s the dense plot. You should be able to follow the general idea the first time though, but it’s certainly a book that benefits from multiple readings. Otherwise it’s really a must have for Shirow fans, seinen fans, and sci-fi/cyberpunk fans.

Volume one of Appleseed: The Promethean Challenge is available now.