Ghost in The Shell Manga has a Major flaw
So, as someone who’s a huge fan of Oshii’s movies and Stand Alone Complex, I didn’t enjoy the manga nearly as much for one critical flaw. If you’ve watched either of those Ghost in The Shell versions, then you’ll know that they have “philosophical” stuff to say, especially relating to technology. The manga does too, but it does so in a very crappy way, with author narration outside the panels. This is extremely dumb, such a thing should be interwoven into the story, not large bodies of text that you gotta read outside the story!
Sadly this isn’t something you can ignore either, various concepts from these comes up in the story and are often relevant, but there’s also a lot that consist of “i think that ai will…” consisting of nothing but the author’s opinion and you’re left wondering why you even read that one. It really does drag down the manga to have these.
Outside of that this manga is good enough. If this isn’t your first GiTS entry(and it probably isn’t) then you’ll probably be caught off guard by how all other entries play things seriously, but this one doesn’t. Major has a full-on lesbian orgy slacking off from work, shit talking people around her, and other things that provided quite the contrast to her later adaptations. This version has it’s own charm that I wouldn’t call superior or inferior to SAC or the films. It never got annoying to me and it was funny at times. Other characters do have the same fate as the whole manga is quite campy, such as Batou being kinda clumsy here, but Major is definitely the most notable with this.
As for the art, it is very good. Characters are expressive, there’s some cool cyberpunk sci-fi aesthetics going on here and some cooler visuals from that. The coloring in my official deluxe edition isn’t very good, but that isn’t the original manga’s fault.
Overall a solid enough manga that is heavily dragged down by the excessive author’s notes. Do I recommend this? The PS1 game cutscenes are the closest adaptation of the manga(so far!). If you enjoy that video, you’ll probably enjoy the manga.