I recently got into a manga series called Until Death Do Us Part, which curious readers are free to investigate at the provided link.

It occurs to me that the setting is pretty much Shadowrun without the orks.

It's about a blind swordsman in a dark near-future who uses cybernetic ultrasonic vision and a monokatana - along with the support of a hacker/techie in a tricked-out bulletproof van - to protect a psychic girl from corrupt corporations, gangs, mercenaries, and terrorists; he also fights crime (mostly by chopping it up).

His opponents include various themed hitmen and black ops badasses, including a drone rigger and a guy with an armored cyberarm. There's also another rigger who rides a totally badass bike who wears heavy armor and beats up bad guys by driving up/through walls and through gunfire and smashing faces with his tires.

I know this isn't the only cyberpunk comic out there. Anyone else have suggestions to share?

The Punisher Max one-shot "Hot Rods of Death" is very Shadowrun, and a lot of other things that are thanked in the credits.

Actually, it shows two sides of a Shadowrun, come to think of it. A Corporate-Hired Shadowteam, and a Hooding Prime Runner.

Actually, yeah, the MAX Punisher is nicely gritty stuff.

Being hired by a shady government agency to break into a russian missile silo to try and get a little girl out so that they can harvest the biological superweapon out of her blood before the applied anti-virus kills it forever, only to escape the silo by reprogramming an ICBM into a makeshift escape pod...

Fuck yes Punisher Max is pure run material.

"I was wrong; he's not an American. He's a Russian who was born there by accident."

The Losers. Kind of like the A-Team for the new millenium, lots of conspiracy and anti-government paranoia, and every single arc is a shadowrun. Excellent, excellent stuff.

Tenjou Tenge. About what happens when you create a school specifically for adepts, and let them run wild. I talk about this one all the time on here. Link is NSFW, by the way; drawn by a hentai artist who loves him some boobies.

Then there's the manga and comics I've been using as inspiration, but they're not Shadowrun per se: .Hack, Densha Otoko, Paradise Kiss, Cloth Road, Spider-man 2099, Spider-man Noir, Batman Beyond, those sorts of things.

ETA:

I almost forgot Read or Die! She's a paper-manipulating book otaku. She's a super-spy with the ability to phase through everything. He's a mercenary who just wants to get the eff out of the business. Together, they fight the resurrected villainous clones of famous geniuses for the British Library! All set to Sean Connery era Bond music! What's not to love?

Transmetropolitan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmetropolitan) is like a Shadowrun world but from a non-runner perspective. Good read all around.

"The Invisibles" as well, showing what happens when Spike Magicians have to fight off the crush of an awakening bunch of Toxic Spirits.

Silent Mobius can be Shadowrun. Cyberpunk (post-Cyberpunk?) manga about a futuristic police squad fighting "demons" with tech and magic. The future Tokyo where it takes place is a shout out to Blade Runner.

Not to mention Nick Fury and how he's portrayed. That's exactly the type of Mr. Johnson I want to aim for with my group at times.

And the scene where "Daddy" takes off his belt. Priceless!

Oh, and the issues that have Morgan Freeman in them!

Yes, it's all good. I have to get more of those, I think...

Global Frequency has a bunch of good stuff in it, actually a lot of Ellis's stuff would work.

I love this topic!

Check out 2020 Visions by Jamie Delano. All the post-cyberpunk/SR tropes are there, minus the elves and magic. The Invisibles and Gravel are pretty much my Bibles when it comes to picturing how magic works and how freelance shadowrunners operate in SR. See also Testament by Douglas Rushkoff, the Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? adaptation by Boom! Studios, Matt Fraction's Invincible Iron Man and Casanova runs, the Akira phonebooks, Ghost in the Shell and it's sequels (duh!), Gantz; Heavy Liquid, 100%, and Batman: Year 100 by Paul Pope; SpinWorld (one of the few realistic portrayals of life in near-earth orbit in comics); Cyberella, City of Tomorrow, and American Flagg by Howard Chaykin; Kabuki by David Mack; Frank Miller's RoboCop comics from Avatar; the Dynamite RoboCop books; Narcopolis, again by Jamie Delano; and The Resistance (Soylent Green meets The Matrix).

How did we get this far in the thread without anybody mentioning Ghost in the Shell? Though I suppose the Anime is more famous than the manga, but there is "more" manga stuff.

Anyway I've gotta second Transmetropolitan it does the dystopia thing so much better and more meaningfully that many series.

I mean when you get right down to it, a number of "shadowrun" manga/comics could just be edited down to a swords and sworcery setting without changing the plot and not changing too much of the dialoge, just change the art.

Actually despite how it got hyped by CP2020 and early editions of SR, Transmet might be one of the very few series to really get any play out of technoshock.

How could I have missed that one! PERFECT! It even has Cyborgs!


Gunsmith Cats? Some of the characters are certainly Adepts with their abilities.

Wes, I love you for the Kabuki shout-out. David Mack is an absolutely amazing artist, and as someone with a slight (ha, feel that sarcasm) bent towards the Japanese, you will get a lot out of it if you understand Japanese thinking and art. It was one of the first things my girl introduced me to, and I love her for it. But for those of you that haven't read it? It is very cerebral, and only the first few volumes deal with cyberpunk issues. It is very philosophical, but very lovely. And if you're in the Cincinnati area, he has a gallery showing right now at the PAC with a whole bunch of his originals from his last Kabuki volume, Alchemy.

I wasn't a huge fan of Batman: Year 100 though; there wasn't enough "how is he avoiding the countermeasures" and "cyberwarfare" like the back of the book advertised. Was a more grounded Batman though, so I'll give it that.

Can you recommend some good Iron Man stories in the Iron Man movie vein, Wes? I'd like to read more, but no Tony the Dick. Recent mainstream Marvel sucks...


Because every time one of these topics come up, everyone inevitably brings GitS up? I generally call out the rest of Shirow's work as appropriate, but always hasten to add, "stay away from the weird stuff. And a lot of it is weird."


Eh, gotta disagree. You don't read enough manga. Check out some of the stuff I link to up above.

Now, to prepare for tonight's game.

I advise adding more violence.

Oh, and We3 also sort of fits. More as a situation runners would get caught up in.

Almost forgot, but if you want to see how a runner team acts on and off the clock, Black Lagoon. It might not be cyberpunk or fantasy, but the characters just scream shadowrunners to me.

Some episodes being more pink mohawk than others.

Anytime Roberta/Fabiola or Greenback Jane show up, notably.




-k

They'll be fighting an Aztlan strike team with a team magician and helicopter backup.

I'm praying they make friends with the Squids.

Re-read the post above yours.



RE: Batman: Year 100. Your point is valid though I think that write-up was on the DC Marketing team. Paul Pope is more of an anthro-centric sci-fi writer.

RE: Iron Man. Check out Invincible Iron Man vols. 1-5 by Matt Fraction. The dick-ish director of SHIELD who created Clone Thor is gone. After the Green Goblin became Director of National Security Tony Stark was on the run to keep his secrets safe. He even drained his brain of its high-tech knowledge, a la Johnny Mnemonic . Stark Enterprises is dissolved and Stark is trying to pull together a new team of engineers and new products, such as an electric car.

All of Marvel 2099.

Sorry for the thread necromancy but I'm re-reading Marvel 2099 at the moment and wanted to ask if anybody else has used it for SR inspiration.