Black Magic

I'd heard that the story was damn near incomprehensible, and whoever wrote that was right. It jumps all over the place, and it’s pretty hard to follow. It's not that the writing is difficult to understand, the story just literally doesn't make sense. If you consider it to be more of a collection of random short stories set in the same universe, it seems to make it more understandable. Since it was his first work, though, I'll cut him some slack.

The art isn't Shirow's best, and the detailed backgrounds you come to expect from him are nowhere to be found. There was even one panel where a guy was missing an eye for no apparent reason.

The characters never really get a back-story, though I'm assuming that they're supposed to be like gods almost. It's really hard to tell.

Overall, I had fun with this piece, but I can't really recommend it.

This is Masamune Shirow's first work, and as you might expect, it's far from his best. It's a series of semi-connected short stories that are supposed to take place within the same universe, with a set of shared characters that pop up from time to time. The setting is a weird mix of semi-hard and really soft science fiction, with some very badly defined magic/ESP thrown in to confuse things.

The overall plot is basically incomprehensible. There is a prelude and and epilogue that try to bookend the series, but they have no obvious connection to the rest of the story. And the epilogue really doesn't make sense even on it's own terms.

The best story by far is the one where special forces soldiers take on some androids. Boiled down and with the magic element stripped out, it would go on to become the fun little anime OVA of the same name.

The only reason I'd recommend reading this is as manga history. You can see the elements that would be put to better use in Appleseed and Ghost in the Shell, and get an idea of how Shirow's concepts evolved over time.