Stand Alone Complex takes place in the year 2030, in the fictional Japanese city of New Port. The story follows the members of Public Security Section 9, a special-operations task-force made up of former military officers and police detectives. The manga presents individual cases that Section 9 investigates, along with an ongoing, more serious investigation into the serial killer and hacker known only as "The Laughing Man." When a high-ranking government official is kidnapped, the Prime Minister must call in his top crime fighting force known as Section 9. Lead by the beautiful (and deadly) Major Kusanagi, the cybernetically enhanced squad must use all their skill to take down the kidnappers and rescue the hostages. But that’s only half of the mission; can Kusanagi and company find out who’s behind the kidnapping, and, more importantly, just what they’re after? Find out in this thrilling first volume of The Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex!

Deep into the 21st century, the line between man and machine has been inexorably blurred. In this rapidly converging landscape, cyborg super-agent Major Motoko Kusanagi is charged to track down the most dangerous terrorists and cybercriminals, including "ghost hackers," capable of exploiting the human/machine interface by reprogramming human minds to become puppets to carry out their criminal ends.

For students, fans, and scholars alike, this wide-ranging primer on anime employs a panoply of critical approaches Well-known through hit movies like Spirited Away, Akira, and Ghost in the Shell, anime has a long history spanning a wide range of directors, genres, and styles. Christopher Bolton’s Interpreting Anime is a thoughtful, carefully organized introduction to Japanese animation for anyone eager to see why this genre has remained a vital, adaptable art form for decades. Interpreting Anime is easily accessible and structured around individual films and a broad array of critical approaches. Each chapter centers on a different feature-length anime film, juxtaposing it with a particular medium—like literary fiction, classical Japanese theater, and contemporary stage drama—to reveal what is unique about anime’s way of representing the world. This analysis is abetted by a suite of questions provoked by each film, along with Bolton’s incisive responses. Throughout, Interpreting Anime applies multiple frames, such as queer theory, psychoanalysis, and theories of postmodernism, giving readers a thorough understanding of both the cultural underpinnings and critical significance of each film. What emerges from the sweep of Interpreting Anime is Bolton’s original, articulate case for what makes anime unique as a medium: how it at once engages profound social and political realities while also drawing attention to the very challenges of representing reality in animation’s imaginative and compelling visual forms.

Deep into the 21st century, the line between man and machine has been inexorably blurred as humans rely on the enhancement of mechanical implants, and robots are upgraded with human tissue. In this rapidly converging technoscape, the cover-ops agents of Section 9 are charged to track and crack the most dangerous terrorists, cybercriminals, and ghost hackers the digital future has to offer. Whether dealing with remote-controlled corpses, lethally malfunctioning micromachines, or cop-killer cyborgs, Section 9 is determined to serve and protect…and reboot some cybercrook butt! Ghost in the Shell 1.5: Human-Error Processor presents for the first time in America the "lost" Ghost in the Shell stories, created by Shirow Masamune after completing work on the original Ghost in the Shell manga and prior to his tour-de-force, Ghost in the Shell 2: Man-Machine Interface, but never collected until now. Focusing on Section 9 agents in their daily battle against technocrime, Human-Error Processor has all the mind-twisting cybermadness you’ve come to expect from Ghost in the Shell but set in a more police-procedural context with action and suspense galore. Features the stories "Fat Cat," "Drive Slave," "Mines of Mind," and "Lost Past."