The epic, timeless hit that inspired the legendary anime film and made the word "manga" part of the global vocabulary returns in a new hardcover edition. The AKIRA Hardcover Collection features the original right-to-left manga reading format and Katsuhiro Otomo's original, hand-drawn sound effects in a beautiful, large-sized collectible edition.
Suffering the fate that beset its namesake three decades earlier, twenty-first-century Neo-Tokyo lies in ruin. Set off by the bullet of a would-be assassin, the godlike telekinetic fury of the superhuman child Akira has once again demolished in seconds that which took decades and untold billions to build. Now cut off from the rest of the world, the Great Tokyo Empire rises, with Akira its king, the psychic juggernaut Tetsuo its mad prime minister, and a growing army of fanatic acolytes ready to go to any length to please their masters. Forces on the outside still search for a way to stop Akira, and the answer may lie in the hands of the mysterious Lady Miyako, a powerful member of Akira’s paranormal brotherhood. But the solution to harnessing Akira may ultimately be more dangerous than Akira himself.
Katsuhiro Otomo is perhaps the manga artist who has most defined the medium over the last 50 years. From his breakout early short stories "A Gun Report"and "Fire-Ball" to his timeless longer works Domu: A Child's Dream, Memories, and, of course, AKIRA, Otomo's career punctuated the end of the "gekiga" era of the 1960s and 1970s and charted a new course toward Japanese manga and anime’s now-central place on the global cultural stage. No single work is more responsible for spreading anime fandom around the work than the film adaptation of AKIRA, which Otomo directed himself and which was the most expensive animated film ever made at the time. Today, Otomo is revered by generations of comics creators as a professional inspiration and by fans around the world for his work in manga, anime, live-action film, picture books, public art, and more.
The epic, timeless hit that inspired the legendary anime film and made the word "manga" part of the global vocabulary returns in a new hardcover edition. The AKIRA Hardcover Collection features the original right-to-left manga reading format and Katsuhiro Otomo's original, hand-drawn sound effects in a beautiful, large-sized collectible edition.
Suffering the fate that beset its namesake three decades earlier, twenty-first-century Neo-Tokyo lies in ruin. Set off by the bullet of a would-be assassin, the godlike telekinetic fury of the superhuman child Akira has once again demolished in seconds that which took decades and untold billions to build. Now cut off from the rest of the world, the Great Tokyo Empire rises, with Akira its king, the psychic juggernaut Tetsuo its mad prime minister, and a growing army of fanatic acolytes ready to go to any length to please their masters. Forces on the outside still search for a way to stop Akira, and the answer may lie in the hands of the mysterious Lady Miyako, a powerful member of Akira’s paranormal brotherhood. But the solution to harnessing Akira may ultimately be more dangerous than Akira himself.
Creators
Katsuhiro Otomo is perhaps the manga artist who has most defined the medium over the last 50 years. From his breakout early short stories "A Gun Report"and "Fire-Ball" to his timeless longer works Domu: A Child's Dream, Memories, and, of course, AKIRA, Otomo's career punctuated the end of the "gekiga" era of the 1960s and 1970s and charted a new course toward Japanese manga and anime’s now-central place on the global cultural stage. No single work is more responsible for spreading anime fandom around the work than the film adaptation of AKIRA, which Otomo directed himself and which was the most expensive animated film ever made at the time. Today, Otomo is revered by generations of comics creators as a professional inspiration and by fans around the world for his work in manga, anime, live-action film, picture books, public art, and more.
