The Fall 2017 Manga Guide

Akira: 35th Anniversary Box Set

What's It About? 

38 years after a mysterious explosion left Tokyo a crater and triggered World War III, the near-recovered city prepares to host the Olympic Games, an event Japanese officials hope will serve as a symbolic return to peace and prosperity for their beleaguered country. While the military and police move to scrub up the streets in preparation for this grand event and a coalition of anti-government rebels begins to make a play to topple this fascistic regime, young bikers Kaneda, Tetsuo and their fellow gang members have no concerns larger than carving out a few more blocks of territory in the anarchic streets of Neo-Tokyo. Not, at least, until a collision with a deformed young ESPer triggers a transformation in Tetsuo that draws the attention of a clandestine branch of the Japanese military seeking to harness his powers to stymie the prophesied resurrection of the enigmatic “Akira.” Now swept up in the tide of force beyond their control, Kaneda and his cohorts may very well play an instrumental part in a coming revolution. Neo Tokyo is about to explode!

Available for $199.99 from Kodansha, this commemorative set celebrates the thirty-fifth anniversary of Katsuhiro Ōtomo's seminal series with a beautiful box that includes all 6 volumes of the original Akira manga in their original unflipped form for the first time in English, a hardcover edition of the Akira Club artbook formerly available only from Dark Horse, and a patch depicting the series' iconic pill.

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Is It Worth Reading?

Austin Price

Rating: 5

It's difficult to overstate how fantastic a work Akira is. One could write for days about the influence of Otomo's masterpiece, how his visions of a post-war Tokyo grown tumorous has practically become synonymous with cyberpunk. One could gush about his staggering artistic ability, his cinematic sensibilities that know how to shape and place every panel so that Akira motors along for a breathless 2000 pages with a momentum that perfectly emulates the speed of Kaneda's now-iconic bike; one could wax talk about his seeming miraculous ability to fill page after page with hyperdetailed depictions that give every single wall, every single object, every single person an identity all their own without ever creating an overstuffed page. One could praise him for his utterly unique visual sensibilities – grand, grotesque -- that still have not found an equal even thirty-five years later.

Or one could as easily rave about his brilliant writing, his ability to simultaneously weave dozens of subplots into one greater whole, his perfect understanding not only of his characters' many facets but of his perfect knowledge of the larger currents of the society they live in and how these, too, would shape them. Akira is a work that is staggering in its scope, with ambitions to tell the story not just of Otomo's own strange world but of post-war Japan as seen from his eyes. It's an incredibly political – and an incredibly angry – work that offers penetrating insights into the way Japan's heedless attempts to grapple with the nuclear nightmare that birthed the post-war dream will only perpetuate those earlier horrors. About how the rampant consumerism his country's industrial rebirth allowed them then hollowed out an entire culture and gave birth to youth that had no choice but to rebel. About the way power is nothing to be contained by systems and institutions but a force instead that animates us all by accident and will wipe us away thoughtlessly if we attempt to divert it.

What's most exciting about Akira, though, is how in combining these many elements it embodies totally its own youthful protests with a zeal nearly impossible to resist. It's one of the most energizing, thrilling comics ever written: every panel seems like a small celebration of comics as an art. Every new page like a celebration that Otomo is allowed to do this at all. It's a mission statement that was always intended to inspire a thousand other works with its heedless energy and its honest admission that maybe, in fact, the only solution to all the problems it presented was heedless forward movement. It's no accident that Akira is still regarded as one of the high points of the comics form decades later. God willing this gorgeous rerelease helps to inspire a generation that can match Otomo's ambition.

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Amy McNulty

Rating:

There are few anime and manga fans who haven't heard of Akira, even those like me who've managed to go decades without seeing the movie or reading the manga. This special 35th anniversary box set of the manga is as good a time as any for new readers to give it a go and it's a great chance for long-time fans to own a collectible version of one of the world's most famous award-winning manga. The dystopian future depicted in the first volume of the box set is gritty, frenetic, and grim and though it was merely created in the 1980s instead of being set in that decade, there's a distinct 1980s sci-fi movie feel to proceedings. With psychic powers, government conspiracies, and street thug motorcycle gangs, the stakes are high in this series and the first volume does a decent job of setting up the conflict and framing it for the most part from Kaneda's viewpoint. He's the outsider, the guy who just wants to have a fun time who's quickly in over his head and the audience is sucked into this fast-paced story alongside him.

The one major drawback of the first volume, though, is that characterization is weak. We barely see Kaneda and Tetsuo as friends before Tetsuo is suddenly Kaneda's archenemy. The friends-turned-bitter-rivals aspect of the series would have more meaning if their friendship had been established first, but perhaps later volumes put more emphasis on the personal connection between the two of them. The rest of the characters and relationships seem muted because of the high stakes of everything going on around them. There are no stellar, memorable personalities thus far. Even Kaneda, who tries to be roguish, largely falls flat.

Otomo's artwork is amazing and detailed on every single panel. It's not pretty to look at, but nothing in this post-WWIII world ought to be. The colored pages at the start in particular are stunning. Since much of the action takes place at night, Otomo does tend to rely on dark backgrounds and screentones too much, and some of the minor characters can be difficult to distinguish, but those are the only noticeable flaws.

The Akira 35th anniversary box set is already an automatic buy for devoted fans of the series, but even new fans will get enjoyment from this classic story. It may not be to everyone's tastes, and it does little to appeal to those who aren't interested in sci-fi, paranormal, or dystopian tales, but manga fans owe it to themselves to at least check it out.

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Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

I can't think of a more frightening villain than old children. They scared me half to death when author William Nicholson used them in his YA fantasy series The Wind on Fire, and now revisiting them in Katsuhiro Ōtomo's original Akira manga from 1982-3, they're just as terrifying. (I also somehow never made the connection between the two series – could Otomo's old children have inspired Nicholson's?) In Akira, they also sum up the perversion of the world the story is set in – a dystopia where teens run amok with little-to-no adults who seem to care, much less be interested in supervising them, a government conducting shady experiments, and the general feeling that no matter what you do, you'll never get off the bottom. Forget dog-eat-dog; this is monster-devour-monster.

While this may have been groundbreaking in the early 1980s, and it's still a compelling story today, a lot of the shock value has worn off. This may be the first series to do a lot of these things, but it was hardly the last, and now that we've grown used to seeing similar dystopias and tales of authoritarian grimness in manga, there is a slight loss of impact. It's still shocking to remember that Kaneda and Tetsuo are both only fifteen (and Kei can't be much older), but the plot and events of the story are ones that have inspired countless other similar tales. What this means is that if this is your introduction to the franchise, it may not be immediately obvious why this one particular series is so revered.

None of that, however, detracts from the fact that this was, if not the first, at least one of them, and that Otomo is a master of his craft. In a world where the so-called good guys are ultimately corrupt, how could a thug like Kaneda be anything but the reluctant hero? It's a perfect example of carnivalism in how it inverts the expectations of what the world should be like and how it ought to function, and elements of it are still disturbingly timely, especially the way Neo Tokyo plans to use the upcoming Olympics to boost its status and cover up its less desirable elements. The gritty 1980s art looks a little dated, but it works so well with the story that it's easy to overlook it. If you're interested in manga history, this is still a must-read.

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Lynzee Loveridge

Rating:

It's been quite a few years since I sat down and watched Katsuhiro Ōtomo's Akira and admittedly, I've never read the manga prior to this reading. Akira is culturally touchstone, often cited as inspiration by creatives around the world even if they have no other interest in anime at all. It's daunting to even review what has been lauded as a sci-fi masterpiece for the last 35 years. With that preamble out of the way, it's worth revisiting Akira three and a half decades later to see how well this dystopia holds up now that all of us are living in the time span it takes place.

What may be most startling is how premonitory Akira is after all these years, or maybe it's an indication of how cyclical history becomes. The story's first volume could be distilled down into a punk kid taking on an overarching, abusive government but that's a discredit to the nuance of the story. Akira is as much a lushly drawn sci-fi action tale as it is a commentary on the ingrained fear of nuclear destruction, the burying of a country's painful secrets to save face internationally, and a widening gap of values between the older and next generation. Akira sees Japan prepping for the next Olympics by literally building over a nuclear bomb drop site while its youth grow increasingly disinterested in the established social order. The country's government donors continue to feed money into a pit all in the name of national security against an invisible threat instead of working on needed social services.

There's also violent youth gang wars on motorcycles and steady amphetamine addiction among 15-year-olds. Readers can ignore all the real world political commentary drawn into the narrative if they really want to, but it certainly enhances the experience to have some familiarity with bosozoku gangs of the 1980s and the national importance of the 1964 Summer Olympics for the country's reputation and some of the less than savory methods that took place to obtain it.

Akira still feels incredibly relevant and Otomo creates his harrowing vision of the future with gritty detail and perfect panel composition. Panel composition makes or breaks action scenes but Otomo's are gripping through out. I found myself never having to retrace a page sequence to understand a character's place or cause and effect. This is rare; there's quite a few scenes in the Sailor Moon manga where it's hard to tell what is going on during battles. Meanwhile Otomo is practically making fire and smoke its own character and taking Kaneda and Kei through a maze of sewer pipe and yet, I never feel lost.

Everyone should read Akira. I say this despite the fact that its lead is an irredeemably awful sexual predator. I really don't remember that part from the movie, but there's no way to gracefully sidestep what he does to Kei, how he treats the pharmacist he was sleeping with, or anything else he does for most of this volume. Kaneda is a bad person even if his bike is cool.