Is Appleseed Worth Reading? Review & Where to Read
Quick Answer
Worth reading for the art and the ideas — Shirow was doing cyberpunk politics and cyborg action years ahead of most of the field — but go in ready for dense exposition dumps that slow the action down to a crawl.
Quick Verdict
“Genuinely important and gorgeously drawn, but the long political and philosophical digressions ask a lot of patience for a story that's ultimately still finding its shape when it stops.”
Best for: Readers who want the cyberpunk and mecha-action roots of a huge amount of later sci-fi manga, and who don't mind a story that pauses for policy debates between gunfights.
Not for: Readers who want lean, fast-moving action with minimal downtime — the pacing here is closer to a political thriller than a straight shooter.
- Type
- Manga
- Genres
- Sci-Fi, Action
- Status
- On Hiatus
- This review
- Minor Spoilers
- Author
- Masamune Shirow
- Publisher
- Seishinsha
- Platform
- Dark Horse Comics
| Quick facts | |
|---|---|
| Format | Manga (seinen), 25 chapters, 4 volumes |
| Run | 1985–1989 · on hiatus |
| Community score | AniList 6.6 · MangaUpdates 7.2 |
| Content | War violence, graphic combat injuries |
Overview
A non-nuclear Third World War has killed most of Earth's population by the time Deunan Knute, a former LAPD SWAT officer, is found half-starved in a ruined city with her cyborg partner Briareos. They're brought into Olympus, a utopian city-state where roughly half the population is bionically augmented and genetically engineered bioroid citizens live alongside baseline humans under a tightly managed, deliberately engineered social order. Deunan and Briareos join ESWAT, Olympus's elite police and military force, and get pulled into the conspiracies, terrorist threats, and political fault lines running underneath the city's calm surface.
Masamune Shirow wrote and drew Appleseed across four volumes between 1985 and 1989, with a fifth left unfinished. It predates his better-known Ghost in the Shell and shares its interest in where technology, politics, and human identity collide, filtered here through a very different, more overtly political lens.
What it does well
The art is the first and most obvious reason to read this. Shirow draws mechanical hardware, architecture, and cyborg anatomy with an obsessive level of detail that very few artists have matched before or since, and panels reward the kind of slow, close reading that a lot of action manga doesn't ask for.
The ideas underneath the action hold up remarkably well. A city-state trying to engineer lasting peace and stability through genetic design and strict social control, and the quiet authoritarian costs that come with it, was a sharp, ahead-of-its-time premise in the mid-1980s and still reads as relevant now.
Deunan and Briareos carry the emotional weight of the book. Her impulsiveness and his steady, almost paternal patience give Appleseed a real relationship to return to whenever the political material threatens to overwhelm the story, and their dynamic is genuinely one of the more memorable partnerships in the genre.
Its influence is hard to overstate. Reading it now means recognizing where a lot of later cyberpunk and mecha-action imagery actually comes from, including a direct line from Briareos's design to Neill Blomkamp's Chappie decades later.
Where it falls short
The biggest barrier is pacing. Shirow regularly stops the plot cold to let characters debate ecology, genetics, or Olympus's governing philosophy at length, and those sections read more like position papers than dialogue. It's thematically rich but structurally awkward, and it can make even short chapters feel like a slog.
Because of that, action sequences that should land as urgent and kinetic instead feel interrupted — the momentum keeps resetting every time the story needs to explain itself again.
And because the fifth volume was never finished, several of the larger political threads the first four volumes spend so much time setting up never actually resolve, which makes the ending feel more like a pause than a conclusion.
Verdict
Appleseed is a genuinely important, beautifully drawn piece of cyberpunk history, and its ideas about engineered utopia and technological control still have teeth. But it asks real patience of its readers, trading momentum for philosophy more often than the genre usually allows, and it never gets to finish the argument it spends four volumes building. Worth reading for what it is and what it influenced — just go in knowing it's closer to a dense political thriller with mecha than a straightforward action book.
Strengths & Weaknesses
Strengths
- Shirow's art is extraordinary even by his own standards — intricately detailed mecha, architecture, and hardware design that rewards slowing down and actually looking at the page rather than just reading through it.
- The central premise, a post-war utopia built on bioroid citizens and heavy state control, was asking real questions about genetic engineering, political stability, and what a 'perfect' society costs long before most cyberpunk got there.
- Deunan and Briareos are a genuinely good duo — her volatility against his calm, cyborg steadiness gives the book an emotional anchor that the political material alone wouldn't provide.
- Its fingerprints are all over later sci-fi action, from Ghost in the Shell's own DNA to Neill Blomkamp citing Briareos as a direct influence on Chappie's design — reading it now means seeing where a lot of familiar ideas actually started.
Weaknesses
- The exposition is heavy and frequent — entire pages stop the action for dense political, ecological, or philosophical dialogue that reads more like a policy brief than a conversation between characters.
- Pacing suffers for it; action sequences that should feel urgent get interrupted constantly by world-building asides, which makes the book a slower, more demanding read than its genre and cover art suggest.
- The story was never finished — the fourth volume wraps up a chapter of the larger arc, but the suspended fifth volume means several of the bigger political threads never pay off.
Similar Titles
Shirow's other, more tightly focused cyberpunk classic, and the clearer entry point if the politics-heavy approach here is a dealbreaker.
a shorter, funnier Shirow cyberpunk work with similarly dense mecha design and a much lighter tone.
a different artist's take on dense sci-fi world-building wrapped around mecha combat and genetically engineered humanity.
Prefer to watch? There's an anime
Appleseed: see where to stream it legally, plus episode guides and trailers, on Watchanimee.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Appleseed finished?
No. Four volumes were collected between 1985 and 1989, and a fifth volume began serialization in 1991 but was suspended; Shirow has said he has no current plans to continue it.
Do I need to read Ghost in the Shell first?
No, the two are unconnected stories. Appleseed came first and shares some of Shirow's recurring interests in cybernetics and political control, but neither requires the other.
Is this more plot-driven or idea-driven?
Idea-driven. The action and character beats are real, but a lot of the page count goes to political and philosophical discussion about how Olympus actually functions.
