Manga like Ghost in the Shell: 5 perfect cyberpunk stories to read next

While you wait for the new anime adaptation, descend into the bowels of these strange dystopian cityscapes

Masamune Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell is a seminal cyberpunk story. Set in the fictional New Port City, Ghost in the Shell follows the exploits of Public Security Section 9, a task force dedicated to fighting crime and catching cyber-criminals. Our protagonist, Major Motoko Kusanagi, is a field commander who also happens to be a cybernetic human, making her vulnerable to attacks from the most advanced cyberhackers in a city teeming with corruption. Originally released in 1989, Masamune’s manga has been adapted across mediums, including two films, one television series, two ONA entries, and a Hollywood live-action movie starring Scarlett Johansson.

Science Saru (Devilman Crybaby, Dandadan) is currently preparing to release a new Ghost in the Shell anime series, and the hype couldn't be higher. Every interpretation of this iconic tale has brought new genre elements to the table, while reimagining Shirow’s exploration of sentience in a post-cyberpunk world. Does an artificial consciousness become human upon achieving singularity? And does humanity erode once we augment our natural bodies with increasingly invasive cybernetic implants? These are some questions we can expect the new Ghost in the Shell to tackle once it premieres in July.

While we wait, here are 5 cyberpunk manga you can check out. Some are foundational to our understanding of the genre, while others function as worthwhile additions.

5 Battle Angel Alita

Robert Rodriguez’s movie adaptation, Alita: Battle Angel, boasts a cult following for a reason. Despite the film’s narrative flaws, it is a technical marvel that is grounded in charm. If you’re in search of narrative depth, look no further than the acclaimed source material, Yukito Kishiro’s Battle Angel Alita. An amnesiac female cyborg named Alita is found by Daisuke Ido, a cyber medic expert who rebuilds her. After Alita regains the memory of the cyborg martial art Panzer Kunst, she decides to become a bounty hunter in an attempt to rediscover her past. Kishiro’s manga expertly juggles spectacle with robust characterization against the backdrop of a bleak world submerged in violence.

Battle Angel Alita is gorgeous to behold. Kishiro’s texture-heavy art style brings the horrors of the Scrapyard to life, where scrap heaps constantly rain down on ground dwellers from the affluent aerial city of Zalem. Alita’s rebirth lends a fresh perspective to such a cruel reality, as we realize that the Scrapyard and Zalem are locked in a toxic, codependent cycle. Kishiro excels at unsettling worldbuilding, drawing inspiration from Philip K. Dick, whose Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? also features a cityscape that feels sentient. Beneath such sweeping themes is an intimate story about identity and moral choice, where Alita needs to understand where her true purpose lies.

4 Biomega

Tsutomu Nihei might be best known for his cyberpunk magnum opus, Blame!, but Biomega infuses the genre with a surreal zombie apocalypse bent. The year is 3000, and the extraterrestrial N5S virus is turning Earth’s inhabitants into mindless biomechanical zombies. We follow Zoichi Kanoe, a synthetic human trained by Toa Heavy Industries to combat these mutant creatures. Zoichi is also on a mission to find humans who are immune to the virus. The teenage girl named Eon Green is one such candidate, but she's nabbed by the Public Health Department — a subsidiary of the antagonistic Data Recovery Foundation (DRF) — before Zoichi can secure her.

It's worth noting that Biomega, which was first serialized in 2004, predates influential zombie horror like The Last of Us (the first video game came out in 2013). In many ways, Biomega is an overlooked genre hybrid that deserves its flowers for fleshing out a futuristic world on the brink of zombie-powered ruin. Nihei’s art is both sprawling and claustrophobic, where once-populated cityscapes and urban sprawls stand empty with massive military edifices looming over our characters at all times. The virus, of course, signifies the loss of humanity, but Nihei develops this theme further by bringing corrupt megacorporations into the mix and edging towards a biopunk storyline.

3 Eden: It’s an Endless World!

Near-apocalypses often go hand-in-hand with post-cyberpunk settings. Hiroki Endo’s Eden: It’s an Endless World! is set in the aftermath of a global pandemic that kills 15 percent of the world’s population. Death isn’t the only fallout: The pandemic has left several disfigured, plunging the world into chaos. Ennoia and Hannah seem removed from this chaos, as they live on a remote island named Eden alongside researcher Lane Morris. The narrative flits between past and present to paint a somber picture, where a powerful organization named Propater attempts to seize control of this fractured world.

The 20-year narrative jump in Eden is as complex as it is breathtaking. Endo uses Gnostic mythology to weave a story about revenge, involving people from all walks of life to flesh out our protagonist, Elijah, and his sister Mana. This is a coming-of-age tale that has no space for tender reflections, as Elijah is too busy fighting a broken system that flourishes due to corruption. Machines are as morally dubious as humans in such a dystopian setting, making life unbearable in ways that mirror our current reality. Eden: It’s an Endless World! is a must-read for anyone who appreciates darker cyberpunk themes in the same vein as Texhnolyze.

2 Akira

Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira is a genre-defying gem. The 1988 film defined cyberpunk aesthetics and reinforced the jarring blend of the political and supernatural in mainstream genre titles. Otomo, who also wrote and illustrated the manga, considerably shortened this epic tale to tailor it for the cinematic medium, yielding excellent results. The heart of Akira, however, lies in Otomo’s dense manga, which extends beyond Shōtarō and Tetsuo’s fates in dystopian Neo-Tokyo. After all, the manga is the source of the film’s most compelling themes, including the social isolation that comes with possessing psychic abilities that are coveted by every faction.

Akira draws us in with its stunning, maximalist art style. Congested cityscapes hide the most evocative glimpses into human suffering, with people constantly chasing a twisted sense of purpose. This is paired with a storyline about two friends who are forced to counter one another. While Shōtarō slips into the shoes of a rebellious hero, Tetsuo discards such moral frameworks after unchecked power corrupts him. The dramatic scope of the manga is significantly wider than the film, as it captures the nitty-gritties of gang violence, shady scientists, and exploitative authority figures. Even when things get convoluted, Akira never loses sight of its goal of tapping into the collective anxieties about our distant future.

1 Blame!

Any discourse about cyberpunk manga is incomplete without Tsutomu Nihei’s Blame! This cult classic is a pure distillation of the cyberpunk ethos, radically rewiring our expectations of the genre. Set in the ginormous megastructure called The City, Blame! opens with the cyborg Killy, who is seen wandering the desolate megapolis with his Gravitational Beam Emitter (a compact, but deadly weapon). Killy is in search of something elusive: a genetic marker that allows humans to access the Netsphere, which all of humanity got cut off from at some point. During his mission, Killy teams up with Cibo, the head scientist at the Bio-Electric Corporation. Together, they navigate an artificial landscape peppered with scattered human tribes and survivors, along with hostile cyborgs.

Nihei’s manga is marked with existential dread. While most cyberpunk narratives (including William Gibson’s cornerstone novel, Neuromancer) limit their scope to that of a decaying world, Blame! makes it clear that the universe has outgrown the need for human civilization. The Netsphere is key to re-establishing control over an indifferent universe, but can a lone cyborg and his sidekick battle such impossible odds? Blame! is beautiful and horrifying enough as a cyberpunk fable of cosmic proportions, but Nihei expands his mythos in the prequel manga, NOiSE, which is as cerebral and action-packed as its predecessor.