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.
In Neo-Tokyo, the armed might of Earth is massed against the godlike powers of two psychic titans, the mute child Akira and the deranged youth Tetsuo. While Akira has unintentionally destroyed the city twice before, Tetsuo has ravaged the surface of the Moon for his sheer amusement, and his madness grows as his abilities expand. But he is gradually losing control of the limitless energies that rage within him, mutating Tetsuo into a horror beyond imagination, and as all forces converge for a final confrontation, the fate of the planet lies in the hands of mere mortals...and the mind of a child.
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.
In Neo-Tokyo, the armed might of Earth is massed against the godlike powers of two psychic titans, the mute child Akira and the deranged youth Tetsuo. While Akira has unintentionally destroyed the city twice before, Tetsuo has ravaged the surface of the Moon for his sheer amusement, and his madness grows as his abilities expand. But he is gradually losing control of the limitless energies that rage within him, mutating Tetsuo into a horror beyond imagination, and as all forces converge for a final confrontation, the fate of the planet lies in the hands of mere mortals...and the mind of a child.
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.
