Akira is pretty close to our time frame right now, so it's fun sort of fun to read a story published 30 years ago that thought the 'future' was going to be so different. It has an interesting story in a post-apocalyptic world that reminds me very much of the video games I'd play on Nintendo that were set in the decimated world of the post-war 1990s. I’m not seeing how ground-breaking it is because the ground has already been well and truly broken by the time I’m getting into manga.

However, I’m coming to this well after the series was published, and I’m seeing the fruits of Otomo’s labor. Someone even compared it to the Japanese version of Watchmen in terms of its influence. People point to Akira as being so inspirational and launching genres. The book has been adapted into an animated film that's a favorite among anime fans.Ĭopyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.As soon as I finished reading this manga, I couldn’t figure out what all the fuss was about. The translation is sometimes a bit awkward, although it still expresses the story's visceral force. Akira has been praised for 'massively decompressed storytelling' a few seconds of story time can take pages and Otomo's hyperkinetic black-and-white drawings explode across the page. When one of the young bikers begins manifesting violent, supernatural powers that threaten to destroy him, both bikers find themselves enmeshed in a massive conflict between two sinister agencies (which both believe they're fighting to save the world) over some unnamed thing so terrifying it's locked away in a vault and frozen to absolute zero. The complicated plot revolves around two teenagers in a motorbike gang that encounters a strange child with an old man's features.

But this first volume is all action, nonstop car chases and gun fights strung together with exaggerated speed lines and lots of gigantic machinery. Set in Tokyo 38 years after its destruction in World War III (which, according to this story, happened in 1992), Akira eventually evolves into a philosophical investigation of time. This new six-volume series is the first time it's appeared as an English-language graphic novel. Originally serialized in Japan between 19, Otomo's 2,000-plus-page science fiction epic Akira was reprinted as a monthly comic book in the U.S.

Akira, Vol. 1 by Katsuhiro Otomo