An Introduction to Akira, Volumes 1 & 2

The Beginning of Katsuhiro Otomo's Manga and Anime Epic

Jun 14, 2009

Katsuhiro Otomo's love of manga and cinema came together in the 1980s. The early volumes of his Akira manga are closely linked with his later anime adaptation.

Manga artist Katsuhiro Otomo had a fascination with cinema since his boyhood in Japan's rural Miyagi Prefecture. Until moving to Tokyo to make a name for himself as a mangaka, Otomo would take trains to movie theaters many hours away.

By the late 1970s and early 1980s, Otomo was building a reputation with such successful manga as Fireball and Domu, which was the first manga to win Japan's Science Fiction Grand Prix Award. But the intersection of Katsuhiro Otomo's love of comics and movies would coalesce in his next project.

In 1982, publication began of Akira, which would appear in serialized form over the next decade. Otomo's epic (totaling over 2,000 pages) became one of the most famous and acclaimed manga ever. Ironically, it was the last major work Katsuhiro Otomo would write and illustrate before moving to film.

Even as Akira the manga was still incomplete, Otomo began his new career as a film director with an Akira film, released in 1988. The cinematographic sophistication and technical skill of Akira revolutionized anime much as its forerunner had revolutionized manga. However, an understanding of the film is much harder without first having read the manga upon which it is based.

Akira was published in an American edition by Dark Horse Comics in six volumes beginning in 2000. The art was mirrored, so that it could be read from left to right in English, but it was kept in black and white (some foreign editions of Akira have been colorized).

The first volume is set in Neo-Tokyo, thirty-eight years after the old city was destroyed in World War III. Kaneda and Tetsuo, members of a teenage motorcycle gang, encounter a psycho-kinetic child while racing near ground zero. Government troops retrieve the child, and Kaneda and Tetsuo, who has been injured, are split up.

Testuo is taken away by the Colonel, head of the secretive Project Akira, for tests. Meanwhile, Kaneda meets Kei, a girl who is part of an underground movement trying to uncover the truth about Akira. Later, Tetsuo begins to manifest psycho-kinetic powers of his own, and escapes from the Colonel. In increasing pain, Tetsuo takes over a rival biker gang, the Clowns, to get access to drugs.

The first volume ends with a showdown between Tetsuo and the Clowns on one side, and the other rival gangs on the other, led by Kaneda. But Tetsuo's power has become too great for Kaneda to kill him. When the Colonel tracks them down, Tetsuo grudgingly rejoins the Akira Project because only the Colonel's advanced drugs can take away his pain.

While Tetsuo is taken back for more tests, Kaneda and Kei are imprisoned. But, aided by the psycho-kinetic children who are studied as part of Project Akira, they escape and search for Tetsuo. Tetsuo's power has already grown beyond the project's control, meanwhile, and he confronts the other children.

Akira is the most powerful of the psycho-kinetic children, and it was his power, not an atomic bomb, which had destroyed Tokyo in the war. Tetsuo learns he is being kept frozen in a secret facility deep underground, and determines to free Akira.

The second volume comes to a climax as government forces, led by the Colonel, and resistance agents, including Kaneda, Kei, and her friend Ryu, converge on the Akira facility. Akira revives in Tetsuo's presence, and escapes with him to the surface. Finally, the Colonel orders a military satellite to fire upon Tetsuo in a desperate attempt to stop him.

Many of the events of the Akira manga's first two volumes were compressed into Katsuhiro Otomo's anime adaptation. Partly this was due to the constraints of a two-hour movie, and reading the manga will make details clearer.

For instance, a drug capsule is used as a motif in Akira's promotional materials and DVD re-release. But only in the manga is it clear that Kaneda's pill-popping bike gang uses the capsule as a logo. Moreover, a plot point about a super-capsule, originally from Project Akira and stolen by Kaneda, never made it into the anime version.

As the Akira manga progressed into its later volumes, however, it grew increasingly different from the anime version – not least because the movie was made before the manga was complete. Yet they share a common origin, and one cannot be fully understood without the other.

The copyright of the article An Introduction to Akira, Volumes 1 & 2 in Manga is owned by Luke Arnott. Permission to republish An Introduction to Akira, Volumes 1 & 2 in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.