Katsuhiro Otomo

• 1. Introduction

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  Katsuhiro Otomo was born in Tome, Miyagi Prefecture, in a region so rural that, as a child, he said there was simply nothing to do. So he read manga. His parents limited him to one book a month, and he would carefully choose Kobunsha's Shōnen magazine, copying out Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy and Mitsuteru Yokoyama's Tetsujin 28-go in his elementary school sketchbooks. Nobody looking at that quiet boy in the Tōhoku countryside would have guessed he was going to rearrange the visual language of comics entirely.

  What questions does a life like this raise? How does a child who grew up far from any major artistic center become the first manga artist to win the Grand Prix de la ville d'Angoulême, the most prestigious award in the French comics world? How does a single manga series, begun in 1982 with only ten chapters planned, run for eight years and two thousand pages and produce one of the most celebrated animated films in history? And what does it mean when Naoki Urasawa, one of Japan's greatest living storytellers, says that after Otomo arrived on the scene, there was simply no room left for further changes to the form?

• 2. A Career Begins

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  On the 4th of October 1973, a nineteen-year-old named Katsuhiro Otomo published his first professional work: a manga adaptation of Prosper Mérimée's short story "Mateo Falcone," retitled "A Gun Report." He had moved to Tokyo after a high school friend introduced him to an editor at Futabasha, who, on seeing the teenager's work, told him to make contact once he graduated.

  For the next several years, Otomo worked steadily on short stories for the weekly magazine Weekly Manga Action. He described the commercial manga landscape of the late 1970s as dominated entirely by gekiga and sports manga. There was nothing touching science fiction. Recalling how much he had loved science fiction as a child, he set out to change that, wanting work that felt, in his own words, more realistic and believable.

  In 1979 that ambition produced Fireball, his first science-fiction manga. It was never completed, but it is regarded as a milestone in his career, containing many of the themes he would develop in later work. That same year, around the publication of his Short Peace short story collection, critics in Japan began to notice that something new was happening in Otomo's pages. The artists who came after him would name that moment as the point when their understanding of the form shifted.

• 3. Domu and the New Wave

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  Domu began serialization in January 1980 and ran until July 1981. It was not collected in book form until 1983, when it won the Nihon SF Taisho Award, and then also claimed the 1984 Seiun Award for Best Comic. For the director Satoshi Kon, who later worked as Otomo's assistant on both manga and film, Domu was one of the most significant influences of his career.

  American director Rian Johnson singled out Domu specifically, pointing to parallels between how telekinesis is depicted there and in his film Looper. The psychic-power premise was not, on its own, new to Japanese genre fiction. What changed was the visual grammar Otomo built around it. He credited Tetsuya Chiba's framing, which he had studied with great admiration at a store in Kichijoji, as the foundation for how he learned to make backgrounds and characters feel tangible together. Chiba's seinen sports manga Notari Matsutaro is the work he cites most directly.

  It was in Domu that Otomo first built the dense, architecturally precise apartment-complex environments that became a signature of his style. He would later say, with some pride, that he did not think anyone before him had put as much effort into depicting buildings. He traced this habit partly to Shigeru Mizuki's manga, which had impressed on him how important backdrops were to the emotional truth of a story. The result was a visual world that felt inhabitable in a way earlier manga had not.

• 4. Akira

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  Kodansha had been pressing Otomo to produce something for their new Young Magazine for some time when he finally agreed in 1982. From the very first meeting with the publisher, Akira was discussed as a project of only about ten chapters, "or something like that." Otomo later said he genuinely was not expecting it to succeed.

  It ran for eight years. The completed series filled two thousand pages of artwork. The first episode appeared in issue 52 of Young Magazine on the 6th of December 1982. In 1988, Otomo directed the animated film adaptation himself, making Akira one of the rare major works in which a single creator controlled both the source material and its film translation.

  He embedded his own history inside the story. The title character, Akira, is also known as No. 28, a direct homage to Yokoyama's Tetsujin 28-go, which he had copied in elementary school notebooks, and which he acknowledged shared the same overall plot. In 2017, a tribute book titled Otomo: A Global Tribute to the Mind Behind Akira was published simultaneously in Japan, France, and the United States, featuring writing and artwork from eighty artists. Among them were Masakazu Katsura, Taiyo Matsumoto, Masamune Shirow, and Stan Sakai.

• 5. Influences and Visual Philosophy

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  Otomo said that when he first began drawing seriously, after reading Shotaro Ishinomori's How to Draw Manga, he tried to imitate the most traditional manga styles he knew, including Tezuka's. By high school, though, illustrative work by figures such as Tadanori Yokoo and Yoshitaro Isaka had captured his attention, and he began looking for a way to bring that illustrative quality into character design.

  French cartoonist Moebius, known for his realistic figures, is frequently cited among Otomo's biggest influences. Japanese critics took note by praising Otomo as the first manga artist to draw realistic Japanese faces. Otomo's own explanation of his method was more careful than that framing suggests. He described trying to hold a balance: depicting things too realistically damages the social realism of a piece, but pushing too far into fantasy drains its imaginative power. He also noted, more practically, that the realism of his earliest work probably came from using friends as models.

  The homages he hid inside his work testify to how personal those early influences remained. In Fireball, the central computer is named ATOM after Tezuka's character. The figure nicknamed Ecchan in Domu is a reference to Ishinomori's Sarutobi Ecchan. Otomo named three manga artists he genuinely revered: Tezuka, Ishinomori, and Yokoyama. When asked about mecha design in Farewell to Weapons, he pointed specifically to Kazutaka Miyatake and Naoyuki Kato of Studio Nue, and added his fondness for the mecha of Neon Genesis Evangelion, while insisting that his influences were too thoroughly mixed to separate cleanly: "In short, I digest many different things and ideas tend to pop out from that."

• 6. Film and Anthology Work

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  At the age of twenty-five, Otomo spent approximately five million yen making a sixteen-millimeter live-action film, roughly an hour long, entirely at his own expense. He said later that making it taught him, in practical terms, how directing actually worked.

  His formal anime debut came in 1982, when he served as character designer for the animated film Harmagedon: Genma Wars. He would later say that working on that film was when he first began to believe he could make an animated film himself. In 1987 he directed for the first time: a segment of the anthology film Neo Tokyo, for which he also wrote the screenplay and drew the animation. That same year he contributed two segments to Robot Carnival.

  Steamboy, a feature film produced with Sunrise, was released in 2004. In 2013, Otomo directed Combustible for the Short Peace anthology, a tragic love story set in Japan's Edo period adapted from his 1995 one-shot Hi no Yōjin. Combustible won the Grand Prize in the Animation category of the Japan Media Arts Festival in 2012 and was shortlisted for Best Animated Short at the 85th Academy Awards. Otomo also wrote the script for the 2001 animated Metropolis, adapting Tezuka's manga of the same name, and directed the 2006 live-action film Mushishi, based on Yuki Urushibara's manga.

• 7. Honors and Legacy

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  In 2005, the French government made Otomo a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He was promoted to Officier of the same order in 2014. In 2012, he became the fourth manga artist ever inducted into the American Eisner Award Hall of Fame. The Japanese government awarded him the Purple Medal of Honor in 2013. In 2014, he received the Winsor McCay Award at the 41st Annie Awards. In 2015, he became the first manga artist to receive the Grand Prix de la ville d'Angoulême.

  Among the game designers who cited his influence by the mid-1980s were Yuji Horii of Enix, creator of Dragon Quest, and several others working at Capcom, UPL, and smaller Japanese studios. Masashi Kishimoto named Otomo as one of his two biggest influences, saying he actively imitated Otomo's art style while searching for his own. Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama, when asked to name his favorite manga artist, singled out Otomo as "incredible."

  From the 8th of April to the 8th of May 2021, a gallery in New York City mounted "Good For Health, Bad For Education: A Tribute to Otomo" as its first exhibition. The show included twenty-nine works by international artists, some originally curated by Julien Brugeas for the 2016 Angoulême International Comics Festival. In 2022, Kodansha released Otomo's entire manga output since 1971 as part of a Complete Works Project, personally overseen by Otomo, which restored works to how they appeared in their original serialization after earlier collected editions had altered them.