鉄腕アトム (Astro Boy) influenced 攻殻機動隊 (Ghost in the Shell)

Tezuka asked the question Japanese science-fiction manga has been answering ever since: is a manufactured mind a person? Astro Boy is a robot built to replace a dead child, and the stories are mostly about the legal and social consequences of that rather than about fights. Shirow inherits the question and moves it: the Major is a human brain in a manufactured body, so the boundary Tezuka drew between made and born has stopped being locatable. The ghost, in Shirow's usage, is precisely the thing Astro Boy's opponents keep insisting he cannot have. Filed MEDIUM. It is the debt of a whole tradition to the person who founded it, and the map already records the same source reaching Akira.