Manga artist Naoki Azuma (Keishicho Zoshi, Dragon & Ape) has launched a new manga titled GLITCH WITCH, set in the world of Masamune Shirow‘s Ghost in the Shell. The series began on Kodansha’s YanMaga Web on September 10, with Shirow credited for the original concept and new chapters posting every other Wednesday.
Part of an expanding franchise moment
The launch is timed to a broader wave of Ghost in the Shell activity. The new The Ghost in the Shell television anime from Science SARU — directed by Kamiyama and Aramaki, the team behind Stand Alone Complex — premiered on July 7 on Kansai TV and Fuji TV’s new Tuesday-night “Ka-Anival!!” block and finished its initial run on September 8 with its 10th episode. That series streamed globally on Amazon Prime Video in more than 240 countries and regions (excluding mainland China, Russia and Vietnam) and had its world premiere at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in June with its first two episodes. GLITCH WITCH is therefore one piece of a coordinated multimedia push, adding a spin-off manga from an outside artist working under Shirow’s supervision.
The franchise’s foundations
Shirow’s original Ghost in the Shell (Kokaku Kidotai) manga began in 1989 in Young Magazine. Dark Horse Comics first published it in North America, followed later by Kodansha Comics. The manga spawned Mamoru Oshii’s landmark 1995 anime film — a major influence on The Matrix and a generation of science-fiction filmmakers — plus its 2004 sequel Innocence, the Stand Alone Complex TV series (2002–2005), the Arise OVA series, the Netflix production SAC_2045, a 2017 Hollywood live-action film, and numerous video games. The core setting has proven unusually durable: a near-future Japan where prosthetic bodies, cybernetic brains and pervasive networks are ordinary, policed by the covert anti-crime unit Public Security Section 9, led by the full-body cyborg Major Motoko Kusanagi. The recurring theme — what “self” means when memory and body can be edited or hacked — has kept the property relevant across three decades of technological change.
About the artist and the new manga
Azuma is best known for Keishicho Zoshi, a police procedural, which gives him a background in exactly the kind of grounded institutional storytelling that Ghost in the Shell‘s Section 9 milieu depends on. Full plot details for GLITCH WITCH have not been released beyond the confirmed setting; the official Ghost in the Shell anime X account shared a description alongside the announcement, and the first chapter is readable now on YanMaga Web. Licensing for an English release has not yet been announced.
Spin-off manga set in Shirow’s world are not unprecedented — Stand Alone Complex and The Human Algorithm both received manga treatments — but a new ongoing series launched in tandem with a high-profile anime signals that Kodansha and the rights holders are treating Ghost in the Shell as an active franchise to build on rather than a back-catalogue classic.
Via Anime News Network. Read: YanMaga Web; Comic Natalie.