Akira (manga)

• 1. Introduction

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  Akira is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Katsuhiro Otomo, and when its first collected volume hit shelves in Japan in September 1984, its publisher printed 30,000 copies. Within two weeks, that print run had surged to nearly 300,000. What started as a project Otomo pitched as "maybe ten chapters or something like that" became a sprawling 120-chapter saga spanning nearly eight years of publication. It ran biweekly in Kodansha's Young Magazine from the 20th of December 1982 to the 25th of June 1990, filling more than 2,000 pages across six volumes. How did a manga that its own creator didn't expect to succeed become a landmark of the cyberpunk genre? What drove Otomo to spend all-nighters moving between his manga desk and an anime studio? And how did one series convince the Western comics industry to change the very way it colored its pages?

• 2. Before Akira

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  Otomo had been circling the ideas that would become Akira for years before he ever pitched them to Kodansha. In 1979 he created Fireball, a series about young freedom fighters trying to rescue a group member whose older brother had been conscripted into government psychic experiments. That older brother eventually unleashed a destructive energy "fireball." Otomo ran into a planning problem with that story and had to end it abruptly without the finale he wanted. He later said, "You could say that Akira was born from the frustration I had about that at the time." He also drew from his 1982 manga Domu: A Child's Dream, which used a science-fiction setting, won the Nihon SF Taisho Award and the Seiun Award, and became a bestseller. With those lessons behind him, Otomo went into Akira with a two-page synopsis of the full story already in hand. He predicted he would finish it in six months. New ideas kept arriving, and the story grew as he wrote. The source material also drew on Alfred Bester's 1953 novel The Demolished Man, with its government oversight of psychic individuals, and Otomo cited the 1977 film Star Wars as an influence on the series' cinematic ambition. Most directly, Mitsuteru Yokoyama's manga series Tetsujin 28-go, which ran from 1956 to 1966, shaped the story's architecture: the naming of Kaneda, Colonel Shikishima, and Tetsuo all trace back to Yokoyama's characters, and Akira himself is the 28th in the government's line of psychic test subjects, matching Tetsujin's own number.

• 3. Making the Pages

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  Otomo's working method on Akira was rigorous and exhausting. At the start, he was drawing 20 pages per chapter for a total of 40 pages a month, and he began every chapter by completing the first page in full as a kind of warm-up exercise. He skipped character-pose sketches entirely, drawing directly onto the pages that would go to his editors. His assistant inked the buildings and backgrounds using a Rotring pen and a ruler. Otomo would finish a rough draft two days before each deadline, spend half a day on the characters, then add dust and crevices and cracks to windows before submission. His estimated finish time for that final rough draft was 5 a.m. on Sunday; the completed chapter went to the editors at 8 a.m. Monday. When he began work on the anime film adaptation simultaneously, the schedule intensified: he hired a second assistant, and sometimes a third just to handle screentone. He described walking straight from all-nighters at his manga desk into the anime studio the following morning. Among those uncredited assistants was manga artist and film director Satoshi Kon. Specific decisions about the work were equally particular. The character name Akira came to Otomo while editing an unrelated film, when he heard someone in an adjoining studio repeatedly shout the name, which in the film industry often refers to Akira Kurosawa. He found the gap between that usage and his own plans amusing. Kaneda's iconic motorcycle had no fixed design; Otomo said it came out "kind of random" and changed every time he drew it. Chiyoko, originally conceived as an old man, became a large older woman because Otomo found the original idea "a little boring," and she grew into a bigger role than he had planned.

• 4. The Logo and the Volumes

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  Otomo treated the collected tankōbon volumes as objects in their own right, not just reprints of magazine pages. The first volume, released on the 21st of September 1984, had a painted cover applied very thick, an inside illustration influenced by Tetsuji Fukushima's manga Sabaku no Maō, and an all-English cover with B5 sizing and painted page edges. It caused a sensation in Japan. Because that first volume had a "hot" red cover, Otomo decided the second should feel "cool." Its back cover image was created using video; he said he ruined Kodansha's VCR by repeatedly adjusting the color balance to get it right. The back cover of volume four features an original Akira pinball machine built by Taito, with animation cels pasted onto it by Otomo. Volume five's back cover features an Otomo-designed decorative bamboo rake that cost 2 million yen to make. The manga's logo changed repeatedly during serialization. The first 35 chapters used katakana in a font called Thick Textbook. For chapter 36 Otomo switched to English in Broadway typeface for an Art Deco feel, then changed again for chapters 37-48, and returned to katakana for chapters 49-71, with that version created by manga artist Hiroshi Hirata in a calligraphy style. The final logo, used from chapter 72 through chapter 120, used an English font similar to Impact, which Otomo had already been applying to the collected volume covers. He had to remove the chapter title pages when assembling the volumes and reposition two-page spreads so they fell on opposing pages, sometimes redrawing content entirely to match what he had sketched in the margins during serialization.

• 5. Coloring America

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  When Otomo and Kodansha's Yasumasa Shimizu visited New York City in 1983 to meet with Archie Goodwin of Marvel Comics, Kodansha had already received offers from other publishers, including the newly established Viz Media. Otomo chose Goodwin because of his connections to French artists Otomo admired. Otomo did not want Akira to read as a "strange thing from Japan." Because Japanese manga reads right-to-left, the artwork had to be flipped, but flipping was not as simple as mirroring: backgrounds had to be rebuilt to remove Japanese sound effects and reshape word balloons for the Roman alphabet. Otomo went in and made substantial personal retouches to the American version. Japanese manga is published primarily in black and white, but the decision was made to fully color Akira for the American market to match the norms of American and European comics. The coloring was done by Steve Oliff at a studio called Olyoptics, hand-picked by Otomo after Goodwin made the introduction. Otomo sent Oliff marker-colored illustrations as reference samples and also provided slides from the anime film. At one point Otomo traveled to Point Arena, California, and worked alongside Oliff for several days. After the first five or six issues, Oliff said he was given free rein. Oliff persuaded Marvel to use computer coloring, which was more subtle than anything seen before and exceeded the capabilities of Japanese printing technology at the time. Akira was the first comic anywhere in the world to be colored digitally. That coloring work ran from 1988 to 1994 and earned Oliff three consecutive Harvey Awards for Best Colorist from 1990 to 1992, plus the first-ever Eisner Award for Best Coloring in 1992. The technique it pioneered led to the widespread adoption of digital coloring across the entire comics industry.

• 6. Sales and Recognition

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  Young Magazine's weekly circulation rose from 1 million in 1986 to 1.5 million in 1990 across the period Akira ran. The manga won the Kodansha Manga Award for Best General Manga in 1984. UK fans voted it Favourite Comic at the 1990 Eagle Awards. It won a Harvey Award for Best American Edition of Foreign Material in 1993, and in 2002 took Eisner Awards for both Best U.S. Edition of Foreign Material and Best Archival Collection. Its 35th anniversary edition won Best Archival Collection again at the 2018 Eisner Awards, along with Best Publication Design. By 2000, Akira had sold over 7 million copies worldwide, at least 2 million of them in Japan and roughly 5 million overseas through the 38 issues of Epic Comics. In 2020, the first volume became Kodansha's first manga ever to receive a 100th printing. The manga was published in the United States in 1988, then Spain in 1990, France and Italy by 1991, and afterward Germany, Sweden, South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, and Brazil. By 2005 it was available in more than a dozen languages. Kodansha USA's Naho Yamada described Akira as having "ignited a new generation of dynamism not only in manga but also in European and American comics." The Essential Guide to World Comics noted that the French translation by Glénat in 1991 "opened the floodgates to the Japanese invasion."

• 7. Legacy and Influence

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  Akira predates William Gibson's novel Neuromancer, which is widely regarded as the defining cyberpunk text, by two years: Akira began serialization in 1982, Neuromancer appeared in 1984, and the Japanese translation did not arrive until 1985. Among the works Akira directly inspired are Ghost in the Shell, Battle Angel Alita, Cowboy Bebop, and Serial Experiments Lain. Tetsuo Hara cited it as an influence on Fist of the North Star, which debuted in 1983. Masashi Kishimoto, creator of Naruto, named both the Akira manga and anime as major influences on the foundation of his own career. In video games, Brett Johnson, a developer on the 1998 game Half-Life, confirmed that the diagonal elevator leading to the sewer canals and the design of those canals were taken directly from scenes in the manga. The Akira Class starship in Star Trek, first seen in the 1996 film Star Trek: First Contact, was named after the anime by its designer Alex Jaeger of Industrial Light & Magic. Director Alex Proyas called the final battle in his 1998 film Dark City a "homage to Otomo's Akira." Rapper Lupe Fiasco's 2015 album Tetsuo & Youth was loosely inspired by the manga's character Tetsuo Shima. Plans for the original 2020 Tokyo Olympics opening ceremony included Kaneda riding his motorcycle into the stadium, though a Japan scholar named Tagsold noted the inherent irony: the manga contains pointed anti-Olympic sentiment and depicts a 2020 Tokyo Olympics scheduled to symbolize recovery from a nuclear disaster. Those plans were ultimately set aside when the Olympics were postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the original production team was replaced. As of June 2025, Warner Bros. let the rights to a live-action film adaptation lapse, returning control to manga publisher Kodansha.