Appleseed

In the late 1980s, Eclipse Comics brought Masamune Shirow’s cyberpunk epic Appleseed to English-speaking readers, adapting and translating the Japanese manga with script work by Toren Smith and David Lewis. Set in a post-apocalyptic future where humans and bio-engineered “bioroids” struggle for coexistence, the series follows the soldier Deunan Knute and her cyborg partner Briareos as they navigate political intrigue and high-tech warfare. Running 19 issues from 1988 to 1991, this edition introduced Western audiences to Shirow’s dense, kinetic art and prescient themes of artificial life and societal collapse. It remains a landmark translation that shaped the import of mature Japanese comics into the American direct market.