Akira, Vol. Yoko Umezawa Translator ,. Linda M. York Translator ,. Mary Jo Duffy Translator. The science fiction tale set in in Tokyo after the city was destroyed by World War III, follows the lives of two teenage friends, Tetsuo and Kaneda, who have a consuming fear of a monstrous power known as Akira.
Get A Copy. Paperback , pages. Published December 26th by Dark Horse first published September 21st More Details Original Title. Akira: 6 Volumes 1. Kodansha Manga Award for General Manga Other Editions Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Akira, Vol. Is there anything in this series that would be considered over-sexualized? Sean No, the characters are all drawn rather realistically male and female and wear realistic clothes.
For instance, I assume because you mean female ove …more No, the characters are all drawn rather realistically male and female and wear realistic clothes. For instance, I assume because you mean female over-sexualisation, the main female character Kaori wears, a lot of the time, big jackets, a t-shirt and either jeans, pants or regular shorts.
There are some sexual references but nothing excessive or gratuitous and definitely nothing that could be considered fan-service or out of place within the storyline. Kendall Moore I say this as a complete casual, this is one of the greatest works of Science Fiction out there. Great philosophical themes to it as well. See 2 questions about Akira, Vol. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 4.
Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Start your review of Akira, Vol. For fans of: hijinks; ominous foreboding. View 1 comment. Jun 01, Mizuki rated it it was amazing Shelves: japanese-authors , great , sci-fiction. I first watched the anime adaptation of Akira when I was an eight or nine years old kid despite the gruesome images and the violence, the anime was still aired in daytime 'family hours' during summer holiday back then, shocking and the whole thing really scared the shit out of me.
I mean, what eight years old kid has the strong-enough mentality to handle the image of little children who look like elderly, evil looking massive teddy bear, and a teenager turns into a mother fucking monster!? I on I first watched the anime adaptation of Akira when I was an eight or nine years old kid despite the gruesome images and the violence, the anime was still aired in daytime 'family hours' during summer holiday back then, shocking and the whole thing really scared the shit out of me.
I only started to appreciate this Sci-Fi masterpiece when finally I mustered up enough courage to overcome my childhood trauma and watched the anime again when I went to college. Decades later, I am now reading the manga version of Akira, I am impressed by Katsuhiro Otomo's realistic and detailed artwork, his gloomy worldview and his creativity!
I'm speechless! I'm pleasantly surprised by how the manga is different from the anime movie, and I really couldn't put the book down, off I go to read the next volume!
In this re-read, I can relate to the members of the teenage biker gang and their attitude: even before they were born, decisions had been made by adults who only care about their own interests, their world had been broken up and fucked up by forces which are entirely out of their control, and there is no way out for them outside of being trapped in a city which only viewed them as disposable losers.
So what did those teens do? They rebelled, they broke things up randomly, they disturbed the peace and the order of the society, that makes so much sense. View all 6 comments. A Boy Whose Head Contains A Supernova 'Akira' and 'Lone Wolf and Cub' were among the first complete manga masterpieces to be published in English, and despite the mirror-imaging, were very similar to their original tankobon incarnations.
Katsuhiro Otomo's SF-classic 'Akira' -- as well as it's equally brilliant predecessor, 'Domu' -- revolutionized Japanese comics. It introduced realistic, incredibly detailed artwork that merged a far more subtle manga stylization with European influences, incorporating aspects from the art of 'Metal Hurlant' regulars Moebius, Francois Schuiten, and Enki Bilal.
The importance of 'Akira' is difficult to express, but it certainly rivals US contemporaries 'Watchmen' and 'The Dark Knight Returns', and it ran far longer than either title, giving it an epic scope and grandeur that exceeds both of those seminal works. All that hyperbole crosses without friction to the film adaptation But Otomo wrote and directed his debut when he was only around half-way through the manga.
On a Technical Note: While I prefer the original right-to-left orientation for translated manga, Kodansha is still using the Dark Horse translation that appeared before Japanese formatting surprised the hell out of US publishers by catching on. It's only as big a deal as you make it, in my opinion; obsessive-compulsive types are out of luck, but anyone who has recovered from the mind-blowing shock of confronting a left-handed doppelganger in the bathroom mirror will do just fine.
My preference for R-to-L has to do with preserving the artist's original vision Something like that, anyway. As far as accessibility, flipping the art is probably easier for weak western minds and eyeballs. I'd rather watch a film reflected in a mirror than I would one played in reverse. Domu: Otomo's Pre-Akira Masterpiece Otomo's first masterpiece is overshadowed by the grandeur of Akira, but both the art and the story display the full-range of his creative powers.
In an apartment mega-complex with thousands of residents, the suicide rate has risen dramatically. An old man with terrifying psychic abilities has become senile, and is now indulging his deadly and selfish whims, manipulating the residents like puppets and sending some to their deaths. The families of the victims are baffled. The police investigating the deaths don't know what to make of it all, but as they follow the bizarre trail of clues, they get closer to a killer they're incapable of stopping.
But when a little girl moves in with her family, the old man is suddenly confronted by someone determined to stop his malevolent games, a child with powers that might exceed his own. The town-sized apartment complex becomes a battlefield between two psychic juggernauts, and the old man's malicious games unleash a storm of telekinetic fury that threatens to kill hundreds of innocent people. Otomo was far ahead of his time, and his genius for graphic storytelling inspired an entire generation of young mangaka.
Domu holds up remarkably well, and deserves to have a much wider audience; unbelievably, this is somehow out of print in North America. I don't know what the fuck Kodansha is thinking, but they need to publish a new edition and promote it. If you haven't read Domu, stop whatever you're doing and run blindly around the countryside screaming the title until someone finally tries to pacify you with a copy.
If some asshole shows up with 'Appleseed', add projectile vomit and urine to the routine. Accept no substitutes. View all 10 comments. Jul 29, J. Keely rated it really liked it Shelves: reviewed , science-fiction , manga.
Like many, I read comics as a child, but I was not avid--never a collector--and it was not until I became an adult and returned to comics that I began to look at what they can be, and the stories they can tell.
Whatever avidity I lacked then, I have since made up for, becoming an incidental snob for European comics. Similarly, despite my familiarity as a child with Japanese anime, it is only in recent years that I have returned to that tradition.
I watched Dragonball, Sailor Moon, and Ronin Warri Like many, I read comics as a child, but I was not avid--never a collector--and it was not until I became an adult and returned to comics that I began to look at what they can be, and the stories they can tell. I watched Dragonball, Sailor Moon, and Ronin Warriors when they first appeared on American television in the mid-nineties.
I recall seeing violent, action-packed films on the weekends on the Sci Fi channel. This was before America had a concept of 'anime' or 'manga', but I recognized the art style in the 'Special Interest' section of Blockbuster, and began a tradition of renting one of these over-the-top movies each time I had a birthday. I still remember my friends and I waking in horror one morning to discover my mother had put in the tape of our latest blood-spurting Sci fi flick--against our expectations, she enjoyed it--she even took us to see Ghost in the Shell during its art house theatrical release.
Yet I drifted away from it in the intervening years, and even when I started reading comics again in college, I didn't seek out manga. To some degree, my disenfranchisement was due to the American fandom, which has made popular a lot of very inane comics and shows.
Many of the movies I enjoyed as a pre-teen were juvenile romps which I cannot enjoy now. Yet there are great comics and pieces of animation coming out of Japan every year, even if they don't always become popular.
So, one day as I found myself searching in vain at the tenth comic store for back issues of a late nineties anthology which included a translation of a Franco-Belgian cowboy comic I have grown to love, I suddenly asked myself why I wasn't doing the same thing for Japanese comics--especially because there was a whole wall of them the next aisle over, a luxury an American fan of European comics has never known.
In terms of Legend, the next choice was obviously either this or something by Tezuka who will surely follow. Since I had seen the film as a child and made it my first DVD purchase when I got my laptop one of the few breaks in the long anime hiatus of my college years , the pull of this book was strong. Otomo is one of those preeminent figures in comics--like Moebius or Tezuka--who both as artist and writer revolutionized the way comics looked and felt, and the ways they told stories. Between his meticulously realized architecture and technology, epic fight scenes, and influential body horror visions, his work seems nigh irreproachable.
The reader is often struck by the power and beauty of his panels. Additionally, the transitions he chooses are inventive and lend some scenes that subtle, sensory pacing never seen in American comics. Yet there are odd moments when a head or arm will be the wrong shape or size, and lacking dimension.
It is strange in such a detailed work to see such elementary mistakes--the sort of thing I have never seen Moebius do. These errors are few, and hardly compromise the work, but they are somewhat jarring.
The manga has much more plot and complexity than the film, but you don't see it until later volumes. Even though there is often a lot going on--many characters running around the city, all at odd and running into each other periodically--the story sometimes lacks for depth.
All the back and forth and action keeps things moving, but it's not always the most direct or effective way to tell the story. The frenetic pace often progresses at the cost of character development. The characters in the story are not dynamic, changing figures: their mentalities and goals stay the same throughout the series, which is a long time to go without change.
We do get moments of confrontation between the characters where their relationship is brought to the forefront, but since we rarely get any buildup to these moments, they tend to feel rather artificial. In fact, when I watched the film again, I found it does a much better job of developing the characters and their relationships, using a gradual series of meaningful interactions to let the audience know what these characters think of one another, and why.
Otomo touches on a lot of ideas about power, technology, military force, and personal identity, but often, these notions are communicated though exposition--characters sit down and talk about them. It would have been more effective if there had been shorter character arcs withing the story where the personal conflicts and changes they went through would help to reveal these concepts and explore them more fully.
But that has long been a critique of many of the more lengthy manga and anime series: that they end up spending a great deal of time going back and forth with lots of similar instances of combat to the detriment of the story and pacing.
There is a real artistry to the combat, which Otomo clearly takes delight in crafting--and the visuals are often effective and engrossing--but he's constantly calling back to these big ideas of philosophy and interpersonal conflict, so the form and function are sometimes at odds. But for all that, it's impossible to ignore how well visualized everything is, and how complex and multi-layered the society and politics are.
This is clearly a work of great intensity and concentration, where nearly every panel is the result of forethought and an abundance of ideas.
It is no wonder that this work is widely influential because it is so full of imagination that it challenges the reader to think about the medium in new ways, and demonstrates the power of the singular vision of an artist. View all 9 comments. Feb 05, Sam Quixote rated it liked it. Akira is set in , a decade after a powerful new bomb destroyed Tokyo completely, leading to World War 3.
Neo-Tokyo is populated with drug-fuelled biker gangs battling each other over turf, one of which our protagonists Kaneda and Tetsuo, two best friends, belong to. During a late-night race they encounter a weird young boy with the face of an old man being chased by shady government types. Tetsuo crashes his bike and is abducted by this secret army force. When he re-emerges, Tetsuo has blinding migraines but possesses incredible psychic powers — what is this secret organisation, who are these weird-looking kids, and what is Akira?
After knocking up the school nurse and completely ignoring her pleas for help in deciding what to do about it, he tries to rape the only other female character in the book, Kei! What is it about Japanese artists and their appalling treatment of women?! You could tell they were pals, but besties? Tetsuo just seemed like another member of the gang. We never see why Kaneda would care so much about him.
None of the characters are very well written either. This page book is basically a series of chase sequences between Kaneda and the resistance and the army. But who are the resistance and why are they helping free the experimental old-faced kids? Who are those weird kids? Pills are mass-produced after all. I never really understood the point of the book or much of the world of the story.
As weak as the story and characterisation was, I was still impressed with the storytelling style. The action is ambitious and frenetic but always clear to follow. This is another aspect of the book I really liked, with the artist letting the reader see the story play out naturally and allowing more opportunities for the reader to engage with the story — pay attention or fall behind!
The art itself is unmemorable and resembles a lot of generic manga. It also has the problem of the characters looking too much alike. View all 3 comments. Motor bike gang members Kaneda, Yamagata and Tetsuo's lives are changed forever when they come across a strange being in restricted area of the city.
I am afraid I remain under-awed with my third reading of this acclaimed Manga series! View 2 comments. Nov 29, Brad rated it liked it Shelves: comic-books , cinematic , graphic-novel , manga. If I hadn't seen the film version of Akira way back in the late eighties, at a midnight screening at our local Indy theatre run by the crazy Swede my Dad hated for selling us a nicked table , and if I hadn't watched it repeatedly over the next twenty some years, I'd have read this manga this week with complete disdain.
But the movie, luckily, is a masterpiece, and it is based on the full six part manga, so I have some sense of where Akira is going and what makes it worth while. As a stand alone If I hadn't seen the film version of Akira way back in the late eighties, at a midnight screening at our local Indy theatre run by the crazy Swede my Dad hated for selling us a nicked table , and if I hadn't watched it repeatedly over the next twenty some years, I'd have read this manga this week with complete disdain.
As a stand alone chapter, though, Akira 1 is poor. The characters are all lame in some way, one dimensional and boring: Tetsuo and Kaneda are impossible to empathize with or like, the kids being experimented on are lame, the Colonel is all yankee action movie bluster, Kei -- the hyper-capable love interest -- has become an overdone stereotype.
The action is too frenetic. The pace is unrelenting in a bad way. The dialogue, in translation, is laughable. Even the future world is suffering due to the passage of time. Yet there is something, one thing, that redeems Akira for me. I often talk with friends about the cinematic qualities of American and British comics and graphic novels, but those books have nothing on Akira. Akira is like the missing link between the page and screen.
I don't know manga, so I can't speak to whether or not this is a common feature, but Katsuhiro Otomo discards all attempts at explication. There is know "meanwhile," no "Professor Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters," no added commentary to refresh our memories, no bits of narration to make transitions easy.
Otomo is all film editor. One bit ends and the next panel takes us somewhere else. A straight cinematic cut from one piece of action to the next. For me, it's worth reading just for that.
So even though I was super disappointed with this reading experience, I will keep reading the series. Maybe it will get better. Maybe the whole will be as good as the film it inspired. I'll soon find out, so I'll let you know.
View all 8 comments. At this point I believe most people at least heard about Akira. I've been a huge fan of the movie but finally I got the chance to read the manga too. What sticks out to me is just how simple it is, there is no crazy amount of exposition, just two three pages with shocking good art and a caption here and there..
That combined with the art which is so mesmerising to look at, makes this one heck of a lasting reading experience. It helps that the facial expressions get the emotions across just fine. Otomo the writer also stated that Akira the character was inspired by tetsujin 28 hence number 28 another manga he read in his youth, just that he adds a very serious layer on top of that of being a weapon of mass destruction.
Also by Katsuhiro Otomo. Related titles. Berserk Deluxe Volume 1. Pride and Prejudice. Attack on Titan 1. Berserk Deluxe Volume 2. Kentaro Miura , Duane Johnson. A Silent Voice 1. Blue Period 3. The Secret Garden. I wanted it to be about the marginal members of society. It's society's outsiders, those who don't belong, who are more intriguing to draw. Like we did, young people today should find their own way. It's not for us to say. They wouldn't listen to us anyway.
That's how it goes. Through the breadth of the work, Otomo explicates themes of social division and isolation, oppressive governmental powers, and the abolishment of tradition. The manga is told in a third-person omniscient perspective, mostly focusing around a group of teenagers and the Resistance. The manga starts off with establishing the state of Neo-Tokyo by describing the apparent nuclear explosion on December 6, , which destroyed previous Tokyo and started World War III. The story fast forwards to , where the new metropolis called Neo-Tokyo has been built on an artificial island in Tokyo Bay, gripped by anti-government terrorism and gang violence.
While riding in the ruins of old Tokyo, Tetsuo Shima , a member of the bosozoku gang led by Shotaro Kaneda , is injured when his bike explodes after Takashi , an Esper a psychic child with wizened features blocks his path. This incident awakens psychic powers in Tetsuo, attracting the attention of a secret government project directed by Colonel Shikishima. These increasing powers unhinge Tetsuo's mind, exacerbating his inferiority complex about Kaneda and leading him to assume leadership of the rival Clown gang.
Meanwhile, Kaneda becomes involved with Kei , a member of the Resistance organization which stages terrorist attacks against the government. The Resistance, led by Kei's brother Ryu and opposition parliament leader Nezu gets wind of Colonel Shikishima's project and a mysterious figure connected with it known as " Akira ". They hope to use this leaked information, and try to restrict Kaneda's movements after he becomes too involved with their activities. However, when Tetsuo and the Clowns begin a violent city-wide turf war, Kaneda instigates a counter-attack that unites all of Neo-Tokyo's biker gangs against Tetsuo.
The Clowns are easily defeated, but Tetsuo is nearly invincible because of his powers. Tetsuo kills Yamagata , a high-ranking Capsule, and astonishingly survives after being shot by Kaneda. Colonel Shikishima arrives with the powerful drugs needed to suppress Tetsuo's violent headaches, extending an offer to join the project.
Kaneda, Kei, and Tetsuo are taken into military custody after the climax of Volume 1. They are held in a high-security military skyscraper in Neo-Tokyo, but Kei soon escapes after becoming possessed as a medium by another Esper, Kiyoko.
After rapidly healing from his wounds, Tetsuo inquires about Akira, and forces Doctor Onishi , a project scientist, to take him to the Espers' playroom. There, a violent showdown unfolds between Tetsuo, Kaneda, Kei, and the Espers. It is during this encounter that Doctor Onishi decides to try to let Tetsuo harness Akira—the project's test subject that destroyed Tokyo—despite Tetsuo's disturbed personality.
Upon learning that Akira is being stored in a cryogenic chamber beneath Neo-Tokyo's Olympic Stadium , Tetsuo escapes the skyscraper with the intent of releasing Akira.
The following day, Tetsuo enters the secret military base at the Olympic site, gruesomely killing any soldiers that get in his way. Colonel Shikishima comes to the base and tries to talk Tetsuo out of his plan; Kaneda and Kei enter the base through the sewers and witness the unfolding situation.
Tetsuo breaks open the underground cryogenic chamber and releases Akira, who turns out to be an ordinary-looking little boy. The terror of seeing Akira causes one of the Colonel's men to declare a state of emergency that causes massive panic in Neo-Tokyo. Tetsuo goes missing in the explosion, and Kaneda and Kei come across Akira outside of the base. Vaguely aware of who he is, they take him back into Neo-Tokyo.
Kaneda, Kei, and a third Resistance member, Chiyoko , attempt to find refuge with Akira on Nezu's yacht. However, Nezu betrays them and kidnaps Akira for his own use, attempting to have them killed.
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