Akira

AUTHOR: Otomo, Katsuhiro

ARTIST: Katsuhiro Otomo (illustrator); Steve Oliff (colorist); Saito (cover artist); Mark Cox (cover artist); Lia Ribacchi (cover artist)

PUBLISHER: Kodansha (Japanese edition); Marvel Comics (first U.S. edition); Dark Horse Comics (second U.S. edition); Kodansha (third U.S. edition)

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 1982-1990 (English translation, 1988-1995)

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 1984-1993 (English translation, 2000-2002; authoritative edition, 2009-2011)

Publication History

In Japan, Katsuhiro Otomo published the first Akira story in the December 20, 1982, issue of Kodansha’s Yangu Magajin (Young Magazine). Because of the success of the series Kodansha began to publish the magazine installments in paperback collections in 1984. With the Akira series running strong, the Epic Comics division of Marvel Comics in the United States began publication of the Akira series in booklets of sixty-eight pages each in 1988.

This first American edition was based on Kodansha’s ongoing paperback collections of the series. Japanese manga are read from the top right to the bottom left of the page and are bound on the right side. The American editors converted this to the familiar Western pattern of top left to bottom right by mirroring, or “flipping,” the pages and binding the comic books on the left. Even though Otomo had colored only the few initial pages of each Kodansha paperback collection, the first American edition was completely computer colored by Steve Oliff, whom Otomo chose for this role.

Otomo finished the last of the 120 magazine installments of Akira in the June 25, 1990, issue of Yangu Magajin. However, he agonized over retouching his work for the paperback Kodansha collections. It took nearly three years to complete Akira, with the appearance of Volume 6 in this format on March 23, 1993. As the American edition was based on these collections, Epic Comics issued the much-delayed finale of its thirty-eight issues of the colorized Akira in 1995. Marvel Comics began to publish both paperback and hardback collections of these issues. However, only ten of the thirteen planned paperback collections were published from 1990 to 1993, and only five of the six hardback limited editions were published. This left Akira unfinished in this publication run.

From December, 2000, to March, 2002, Dark Horse Comics published Akira in six black-and-white volumes with only the initial pages in color, as in the Japanese collections. This edition still flipped the manga to conform to Western reading habits. From October, 2009, to April, 2011, Kodansha published an American edition of Akira in six volumes that followed the earlier Dark Horse Comics version, which followed closely the original Japanese six-volume collection of the Akira magazine installments and is discussed below. In addition to the American editions, Akira has been published in French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Polish, and Flemish.

Plot

At age twenty-six, Katsuhiro Otomo launched Akira by building on the success of his previous manga work, particularly Domu (2001). Akira was created for the same young male Japanese readership as Domu. Otomo set Akira in the postapocalyptic Neo-Tokyo of 2030. Thirty-eight years after an unexplained explosion destroyed the original Tokyo at 2:17 p.m. on December 6, 1992, and triggered World War III, Neo-Tokyo sits atop an artificial island in Tokyo Bay.

Akira rapidly launches its story of two teenage friends, Shotaro Kaneda and his sidekick Tetsuo Shima, who become bitter enemies when Tetsuo acquires vast psychic powers. Defying authorities, as is their habit, Kaneda’s gang of teenagers races futuristic motorcycles and breaks through the dilapidated barrier on the bridge that connects Neo-Tokyo to the ruins of the original city. On their return, Tetsuo nearly runs over a ghostly boy, who has the facial features of an old man and is later revealed to be Takashi. Takashi is part of a group of psychics who as children were subjected to secret government experimentation. This gave them various paranormal powers but trapped them in their child’s bodies while aging their faces. Tetsuo is injured when Takashi makes his motorcycle explode before he teleports from the scene. Suddenly, the military appears, and Tetsuo is taken to a hospital.

With Tetsuo away, Kaneda gets involved with a mysterious teenage girl, Kei. She belongs to a violent, secret antigovernment group that includes her older brother Ryu and Nezu, a member of parliament. They encounter Takashi again in the streets of Neo-Tokyo just as a special military unit, led by Colonel Shikishima, tries to capture him. This leads to much violence triggered by Takashi’s paranormal powers and the fight between Shikishima’s troops and the antigovernment forces.

Tetsuo leaves the hospital, and his new psychic powers have changed him into Kaneda’s bitter enemy. He teams up with a rival gang and seeks to kill Kaneda. The price for Tetsuo’s powers, as for the child-bodied psychics, is a new dependence on a powerful drug to which only the Colonel has access. As a result, the Colonel can take Tetsuo, as well as Kaneda and Kei, into custody. The Colonel reveals that Tokyo’s destruction was caused by the powers of a child psychic called Akira. Akira is kept in a cryogenic chamber in cold stasis and guarded by the Colonel.

The bitter fight between Tetsuo, Kaneda, and Kei reaches a new dimension when Tetsuo decides to release Akira from his cold chamber. He succeeds in awakening Akira, who looks and acts like a rather passive boy, but Kaneda and Kei snatch Akira from Tetsuo’s hands.

Soon different forces led by the Colonel, an old woman psychic called Lady Miyako, and the rebels under Nezu all chase after Akira and battle one another violently. When Nezu catches up with Akira, he shoots at him but kills Takashi instead. This shocks Akira into releasing a telekinetic shockwave that destroys Neo-Tokyo in much the same style of his earlier destruction of Tokyo. Tetsuo suddenly appears and leads away Akira.

In the ruins of Neo-Tokyo, the battles between the rival factions resume. Tetsuo sets up Akira as boy emperor for the Great Tokyo Empire and acts as his prime minister. Kei and the Colonel support Lady Miyako, while the Americans enter the scene through their spy, Japanese American George Yamada. At the climax of Tetsuo’s attack on Lady Miyako’s temple, the Colonel fires a powerful laser gun at Tetsuo but destroys only one of his arms. Kaneda, presumed dead, reappears and rejoins the anti-Tetsuo alliance.

Worried about the goings-on in Neo-Tokyo, the Americans and Russians send a joint force of aircraft carriers to the region. Determined to kill Tetsuo, the foreigners consider using biological weapons to kill all city dwellers. Tetsuo teleports to the lead aircraft carrier and demonstrates his power by destroying fighter jets before disappearing. More fighting ensues among Tetsuo and his Japanese and foreign opponents. Tetsuo destroys foreign battleships and even launches a nuclear weapon. He survives being hit by a missile that is psychically guided by Lady Miyako.

While Kaneda and Tetsuo fight a fierce battle at the Olympic stadium, the American-led foreign forces seek to complete the destruction of Neo-Tokyo with a laser satellite called FLOYD. Tetsuo yanks FLOYD out of its orbit. Employing her powers as psychic medium, Kei uses the combined psychic forces of the child-bodied psychics to eliminate Tetsuo’s physical body in a final blast of destruction. Akira absorbs Tetsuo’s psychic energy. Kaneda and Kei tell advancing foreign troops to stay out of Neo-Tokyo and ride off on their motorcycles.

Volumes

• Akira 1 (2009). Sets up the series, launches the mortal Kaneda-Tetsuo rivalry, and introduces many main characters.

• Akira 2 (2010). Offers the story’s first climax with the reawakening of Akira; violent fights over his custody motivate explicit depictions of graphic violence.

• Akira 3 (2010). The second climax, the destruction of Neo-Tokyo, offers a repeat of the initial apocalypse, indicating humanity has not learned much.

• Akira 4 (2010). The rise of Akira and Tetsuo’s empire draws Americans and Russians into the conflict, calling into question Japanese sovereignty.

• Akira 5 (2011). While Japanese factions fight one another in Neo-Tokyo, foreign forces are ready to ruthlessly wipe out all inhabitants with futuristic weapons of mass destruction.

• Akira 6 (2011). After Tetsuo’s defeat, the series comes full circle as Kaneda and Kei return to life as juvenile motorcycle racers.

Characters

• Shotaro Kaneda, the protagonist, is a fifteen-year-old Japanese delinquent youth and leader of a teenage gang of motorcycle racers. Meeting the mysterious girl Kei changes his life as much as when his best friend Tetsuo acquires paranormal powers and becomes his biggest enemy. Kaneda combines human decency with a desire for adventure and distrust of authorities.

• Tetsuo Shima, the antagonist, is a repressed teenager who changes into a power-obsessed, demonic character once he obtains paranormal powers. He represents humanity’s dark side as he uses his psychic abilities brutally to seek ultimate personal power.

• Kei, the romantic interest of Kaneda, is an attractive and mature teenage girl involved with a violent antigovernment group. As a medium, she has no psychic powers herself but can channel those of true psychics; she helps Kaneda to defeat Tetsuo.

• Colonel Shikishima is a major character involved in the battle over Akira. He is a grown-up military man leading a secret government section in charge of psychics like Akira. More sinister in the beginning, he develops into an ally of Kaneda and Kei.

• Akira, the prized object of the series, is a powerful psychic in the body of a small boy. Passive and mild-mannered, he inadvertently destroys Tokyo twice when shocked by the violence around him. He appears to exist beyond good and evil.

• Lady Miyako, a supporting character, is an older female psychic who creates a temple cult and allies herself with Kaneda and Kei. She represents esoteric leaders in Japanese society.

• George Yamada, a spy and assassin, is an adult Japanese American sent to kill both Tetsuo and Akira. He is killed by Tetsuo.

• Ryu is an antigovernment rebel and ally of Kei, ostensibly her adult brother, but the series later makes this claim sound improbable. He helps to fight Tetsuo until he dies shortly before the end of Akira.

• Chiyoko, a major supporting character of Kaneda and Kei, is a middle-aged woman and weapons expert.

• Kaori is Tetsuo’s love interest; she is shot to death by Tetsuo’s jealous captain.

Artistic Style

Throughout Akira, Otomo’s style is extremely cinematic. His panels range from vast, long shots of urban landscapes to middle shots of a group of characters drawn against a visually vivid background and impressive close-ups of weapons or characters’ expressions. His illustrations create a distinctly dark atmosphere for the run-down parts of a rebuilt city transforming itself into a postapocalyptic landscape. Otomo’s large panoramic panels include haunting images, such as the forbidden bridge linking Neo-Tokyo to the original city or the dilapidated concrete exteriors and vandalized interiors of Kaneda’s vocational school.

Otomo’s fascination with machines, particularly military hardware, stands out in the series. Kaneda’s futuristic motorcycle is drawn in loving detail. Helicopters, tanks, aircraft carriers, military special-purpose vehicles, and technical apparatuses are given visual preeminence.

Depictions of graphic violence abound throughout Akira. When characters are killed, whether by telekinetic decapitations or by a barrage of gunfire, dark blood splatters on the panels and injuries are also depicted in graphic detail. Otomo delights in illustrating gun battles, chase scenes, and close person-to-person combat. Sound expressions almost literally explode in his panels, and violence appears ubiquitous and is the focus of much of the visual storytelling.

Otomo’s characters are drawn to reflect the look of 1980’s Japan rather than a truly futuristic alternative. The hairstyle of Kaneda and his fellow gangsters has a distinct 1980’s look. The Colonel is drawn as a masculine leading man with crew cut, but he also has a diamond ear stud. Part of the freakishness of the psychics comes from the stark visual contrast of their child-sized and child-limbed bodies and their aged facial features. Overall, visuals and visual sound effects dominate the dialogue. There are no explanatory narrative captions after the bold, colorized introductory pages in the first volume. Generally, the reader is thrust right into the graphic action.

Themes

Even though Akira is set in the future, many of its themes can be traced to issues in 1980’s Japanese society. A key theme is rebellion against society, particularly by those like Kaneda, who resemble the generation of Japanese youths that felt left out of the “bubble economy” of the era. Kaneda and Tetsuo begin as friends in a teenage motorcycle gang that is modeled after the biker gangs popular in Japan in the 1980’s, which provoked traditional society. Kaneda and Tetsuo’s recreational drug use and drug dealing and their attendance at a decaying, graffiti-ridden vocational school are extrapolations of Japanese worries.

A dominant theme of Akira is an intense amount of violence at all levels of human interaction. Violence ranges from criminal acts of juvenile delinquency to gunfights and military and paranormal confrontation. The existence of a violent antigovernment underground, of which Kei is a member, and the violent response by the military special forces under Colonel Shikishima have historical roots in the violent clashes over the building and expansion of Tokyo’s Narita International Airport from 1967 into the 1980’s. Otomo’s vision of the future incorporates this reemergence of political violence in Japan and widely expands it to become a central element of his dystopian future society.

The theme of paranormal power is used to comment further on possible negative trends in Japanese society. Deeply alienated from the society that has secretly created child-adults with enormous paranormal powers, many of the child-adults themselves resort to violence. Akira himself twice destroys Tokyo when he unleashes his telekinetic powers.

Finally, as Akira was written in the last years of the Cold War and during heightened Japanese-American political tensions, the issue of nuclear war and American military intervention in Japan is a political theme of the series. After the fight against Tetsuo is won, Kaneda and Kei insist on Japanese sovereignty and send away foreign troops.

Impact

In Japan, the popular and critical success of Akira established Otomo’s enduring reputation as a great mangaka, or manga artist. His receipt of the coveted Kodansha Manga Award in the General Category in 1984 fueled the development of his series. Ironically, after completing Akira, Otomo turned from printed manga toward directing manga anime films.

Otomo’s Akira inspired the next generation of manga artists, impressing them with its masterfully drawn vision of a violent future set in a decaying and destroyed city. By 2011, many important Japanese mangaka, such as Masashi Kishimoto, twenty years Otomo’s junior, credited Akira as being deeply influential on their contemporary work.

In the United States, the initial publication of Akira in 1988 made it one of the first manga series to appear in English for a mass comics market. American audiences saw in Akira a powerful contribution to the cyberpunk genre. U.S. readers linked the manga to Ridley Scott’s dystopian science-fiction film Blade Runner (1982) and literary works such as William Gibson’s science-fiction novel Neuromancer (1984), which Otomo did not read until well into his Akira series. The enduring popularity of Akira in the United States fueled a manga boom in the 1990’s. It led to a 2009-2011 reissue of the six-volume collection of Otomo’s work. Akira is considered a classic of the mature-audience manga genre.

Films

Akira. Directed by Katsuhiro Otomo. Tokyo Movie Shinsha, 1988. The adaptation of Otomo’s manga series was the most expensively produced anime film at the time. It set new standards for high production values, featuring over 160,000 animation cels. Made while the Akira series was still going on, the film features most of the series’ characters and follows the story with only a few alterations. The film condenses the series by ending almost immediately after the destruction of Neo-Tokyo, with Tetsuo being absorbed by Akira. Kaneda, Kei, the Colonel, and most positive characters survive.

Further Reading

Nihei, Tsutomu. Blame! (1998-2003).

Shirow, Masamune. Ghost in the Shell (1989-1997).

Bibliography

Gravett, Paul. Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics. London: Laurence King, 2004.

Lamarre, Thomas. “Born of Trauma: Akira and Capitalist Modes of Destruction.” positions: east asian cultures critique 16, no. 1 (Spring, 2008): 131-156.

Napier, Susan J. Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature. New York: Routledge, 1996.

Natsume, Fusanosuke. “Akira Acclaimed.” Look Japan 46, no. 481 (April, 1996): 20-21.