If you have this, you are truly a hardcore and old school Shirow fan. Rare by its age alone, a limited print run also makes this incredibly scarce, so much so that I've never even seen it up for auction. Judging by the thumbnails on sTwo's site, it seems that the calendar images aren't lost to the sands of time, but instead can be found in the back of Intron Depot 1. Presuming I'm correct in this, the images are a series of sketches and descriptions for the various technology in the Appleseed universe. As I'm not sure though, I'm going to pass on showing scans for now.
I know nothing of this one, truly nothing, except that it exists and is alomst as rare as the Appleseed calendar.
This calendar, from what I gather, was a complilation of mostly comission works Shirow had done, particularly a series of Griffon illustrations that I think were originally put out as posters. I don't have this one, otherwise I'd have some better scans for you. Personally, I'm not particularly impressed by this calendar, with only August, October, and November sticking out at all. It's not that the art is bad, I think it's mostly the lack of backgrounds, along with the general color schemes, that knock it down a few notches for me. ::shrugs:: All a matter of personal taste really.
This was a special format desk calendar that opened out in a fashion like this: /\/\ with the images on one side and the calendar months on the other. From what I gather, it also came with a set of stickers, whose artwork I have been unable to locate. This calendar is a reprinting of images that made up another story in Mr. Shirow's Exon Depot line, which you can view more of here. Thanks to images off my ID2 CDs, you get to see the art too:
Our main character here seems to be one of the three characters that Shirow's first series of posterbooks focuses on. Additionally, in late March, there was word that a fully 3D CG anime for this character was under consideration, and there appears to be a network game(MMORPG perhaps?) in the works for the character's universe as well. The opportunity to play in one of Shirow's worlds... sounds like a good reason to learn Japanese to me ^_~
UPDATE 06/22/2004: While I'm not certain, due to language barriers, it does seem that such an MMO exsists. Asura Fantasy Online is the name of the game, and you'll notice immediately on the site a lovely new Shirow gal. I wish I could find some actual in-game screenshots on the site or anywhere, but from what I gather looking at the Tokyo Central forums, it appears that multiple artists have been commissioned for various character profile and card art, and probably aren't involved any more than that. Can't say as I understand the card part, but it may be some sort of tie-in with the long running Asura Fantasy tabletop RPG, which Shirow has done commission work for in the past.
While most of the imagery comes from elsewhere, almost all of it shows up again in Intron Depot 2(with the exception of January's piece, which was the cover art for one of the CD-ROM versions of Intron Depot 1). It's easily one of my favorite calendars as a whole, particularly for March and the Cover, but I like 'em all, even May's oddball image with the flying fish. Interestingly, August's image is a variation of Gemcat's cover girl, appearing as it did on a poster for San Diego's Comicon in the early 90s. If you've got this calendar and ever want to get rid of it, please let me know, I'd love to take it off your hands, as its one of the few I never managed to find for myself.
