Intron Depot 1

      Shirow from Intron Depot 1
      Passages taken from Intron Depot 1 ©1991 Shirow/Seishinsha

      Dominion First Page

      TO MY READERS [page 6]

      First of all, I want to express my heartfelt thanks to everyone at (in alphabetical order) Atlas, Bandai, Byakuya Shobo, Fujimi Shobo, Hakusensha, Koade Kikaku, Kodansha, NAXAT, Seishinsha, and Studio Proteus, all of whom cheerfully cooperated in putting this book together.
      This book is a fairly complete collection of the full-color illustrations I did from 1981 to 1991. About the only pieces missing are the few I did during my fanzine period or mailed off to various individuals. The book covers       Appleseed One through Five, and even includes some rejects and rough drafts. However, I did leave out 34 color pages from Ghost in the Shell: 19 pages drawn especially for the book edition, and 15 monochrome pages that were colored later. Since that edition has 64 color pages, I didn't want to reduce its value intentionally.
      Also, the Intron Depot series will not include the Exon Depot full-color stories.
      Since the rough layout of this book was my own doing, it's not a pretty sight. We tried to trim it so you could see every drawing out to its edges, while keeping the white border to a minimum.
      The book contains 193 full-color works (excluding the rough drafts on the page one, and counting as one work each the multi-panel pages from Dominion and Ghost in the Shell, as well as the separated panels of the Dominion "Seaside" poster and the back cover of the Orion collection). Of these, 47 are published here for the first time. There are 25 monochrome illustrations (page seven is counted as full-colors).
      I have wanted to put together a collection of my work for some time, whether or not it got published commercially. Now I can put this period of my work behind me and move on. If you enjoy it, dear readers, I can't ask for anything more. Enough preliminaries already; go ahead and look at the pictures!
      Shirow December 12, 1991

      NO. CHAPTER TITLE PAGE PICT. NO. CHAPTER TITLE PAGE PICT.
      C
      O
      N
      T
      E
      N
      T
      S      		 1 POSTER 1 3 C
      O
      N
      T
      E
      N
      T
      S      		 7 THE GHOST IN THE SHELL 65 39
      2 CONTENTS 5 2 8 DOMINION 87 19
      3 APPLESEED 7 43 9 COVER & ETC. 101 34
      4 BLACK MAGIC 41 10 10 ORION 127 17
      5 BLACK MAGIC M-66 47 10 11 MONOCHROME 141 14
      6 GAME & ETC. 53 15 FULL COLOR TOTAL 148 193

      Intron Depot real cover
      This is the first picture of Intron Depot (it is under
      the official cover).

      AFTERWORD [page 144]

      As I look over this decade's worth of color work, many things come to mind.... The gap between my fanzine years and the period after my commercial debut, between my debut and the present.... I wonder if I've lost my naïvetè (in the Zen sense), if I grow more comfortable, if I'm improving, if I have any new ideas, etcetera, etcetera.... My old stuff doesn't look as bad as I'd thought from the standpoints of color and energy (even if it does resemble crude doodlings). I've been able to keep my work under control, add variations without loosing basic concepts (same old stuff, you say? - that's okay, I got more cards up my sleeve), avoid sloppiness in my newer work - so I can't complain. I've received the whole gamut of reactions to the changes between Appleseed One/two and Three/Four or from Appleseed/Dominion to Ghost/Orion. Some readers hated the differences, others loved the.

      Personally, I don't feel as if I've ever truly switched directions. I plan to continue on my present course for at least another three or four years. (There's Appleseed Five and Ghost Part II. Since I can't change with the times, I may have a hard time selling my stuff, but I've only myself to blame, right? What the heck, I'll do it my way - or something like that....)

      Overall, my compositions are very similar. Characters do not dominate my manga, so I have avoided frequently used formats like collages of head shots and close-ups. I wish more of my work had the energy of a single movie scene, where the image gets priority... I guess that's something to think about. This book doesn't have the diversity of a collection by a paperback illustrator, or the eye-catching power of an animator's work. (More diversity, and more close-ups and head shots, in Intron Depot 2.... that'll be my challenge over the next six or seven years. I should start branching out a little.... too bad I can't for three or four years....) (sob...) Orion First Page

      Anyway, the more collections by manga artists, the better.... I hope they start planning more for publications. When overseas artists look at this book, they may well be enraged - "What's a scribbling idiot like this putting out a collection of his work for?!" But they must understand that Japanese manga are judged by entirely different standards. Like ukiyo-e woodblock prints, they aspire to a realism of meaning. Also, except for a few sleazeballs, Japanese publishers let artists keep the copyright to their work; the publishers just have the one-time publishing rights. The artist therefore gets his originals back. And the bookstores aren't forced to buy books outright (they return unsold copies to the publisher), so they don't have to worry about ending up with an enormous mountain of unsaleable books. (On the other hand, Japanese distributors pay a lot more for their copies than the U.S. distributors.)

      I've heard that some people complain about the large eyes and small noses and mouths in Japanese manga (do ukiyo-e prints remind them of Broadman's map of the brain?). But I don't see a whole lot of difference when I look at Disney characters. Once you get past the flop from left to right and the differences in language and sound effects, there's no real reason why more foreign artists shouldn't make some inroads into the Japanese manga world.

      In closing, I'd like to thank everyone on the English translations team and the folks at Seishinsha, on whom I have relied in so many ways. Thank you all very much. Now that this collection is finally done, guess I have to start working again. Mañana!
      Masamune Shirow December 12, 1991

      Comments

      Censored picture If you are a true Shirow fan and you are reading these pages, you have to get this book. Remember that it has double Japanese/English texts so you can read it. I know that its price is a bit high (the first printing on July 17th, 1992 costs 2,400 yen), but it's really wonderful: 134 full color and 14 b/w pages, dimensions 210x285 mm.
      I think you can pay less money buying Intron Depot 1 instead of spending a lot of time downloading Shirow's pictures from the web. The code of this book is ISBN 4-87892-011-4.

      I have something to think about different Intron Depot editions. On the web I have found a lot of scanned pictures from an Intron Depot not published by Seishinsha and this version has at last one censored page (I don't know what's happen to the very hot pictures from GitS, page 74). As you can see, the girl in the picture above (page 117) wears briefs while she hasn't it in the original Intron Depot.

      Intron Depot CD-Rom
      Thanks to Lucas.

      IDD Win cover IDD Mac cover Intron Depot has been released on two CD-Roms called Intron Depot D (year 1996; code ISBN4-09-906561-8; price 6,800 yen; available for both Windows and Mac). Unfortunately this box is Japanese only and it doesn't run on English language Windows and it's impossible to read 2,000 new words cut from the printed version for space reasons. So the first CD is useless for Western users (probably it contains a digital version of the book), whereas the second is an image gallery with most of the ID illustrations in high quality (even if some pictures don't look to have been scanned very well), plus 22 interesting black and white preparatory drawings not printed inside the book. Unfortunately there aren't the GitS pictures (perhaps denied by Kodansha) substituted by two simple clock and calendar programs. The box includes also a mousepad.
      Note that the Mac and Windows versions have different covers, both not printed inside the book.

      Years later, Seishinsha has created a CD version of Intron Depot 2 too and they have called it Intron Depot D2 - BLADES. Learning from their previous errors, this time they have used HTML format (so it's readable by both Windows and Mac systems) and included the English text.

      Intron Depot Ver.2.0.0 b

      Intron Depot Ver.2.0.0 b is the name of four color pages printed at the beginning of Appleseed Hypernotes. There are six images: three about Appleseed, two about Dominion and a small reproduction of the poster consigned together with the Seburo replica.

    Flying Shirow Pictures Copyrights
    From the Top: 1) Intron Depot 1 ©1991 Shirow/Seishinsha, Dominion ©1996 Shirow/Seishinsha. 2) Intron Depot 1 ©1991 Shirow/Seishinsha, Appleseed ©1995 Shirow/Seishinsha. 3) Intron Depot 1 ©1991 Shirow/Seishinsha, Orion ©1993 Shirow/Seishinsha. 4) Intron Depot 1 ©1991 Shirow/Seishinsha. 5-6) Intron Depot D ©1996 Shirow/Seishinsha/(?) respective companies. Left: Orion ©1991 Shirow/Seishinsha.

      main index intron depot 1 note intron depot 2 e-mail
      appleseed black magic dominion exon depot ghost in the shell intron depot orion more
      This page hosted by Get your own Free Home Page