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Akira, Vol. 1
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26 new or used available from $23.80
Average customer review:
Product Description
Dark Horse is committed to bringing the finest comics from around the world to America. Now, in association with Kodansha Ltd. and Studio Proteus, Dark Horse has again gathered one of the crown jewels of graphic fiction. Katsuhiro Otomo's stunning science-fiction masterpiece, Akira! Regarded by many as the finest comic series ever produced, Akira is a bold and breathtaking epic of potent narrative strength and astonishing illustrative skill. Akira is set in the post-apocalypse Neo-Tokyo of 2019, a vast metropolis built on the ashes of a Tokyo annihilated by an apocalyptic blast of unknown power that triggered World War III. The lives of two streetwise teenage friends, Tetsuo and Kaneda, change forever when dormant paranormal abilities begin to waken in Tetsuo, who becomes a target for a shadowy government operation, a group who will stop at nothing to prevent another catastrophe like that which leveled Tokyo. And at the core of their motivation is a raw, all-consuming fear: a fear of someone -- or something -- of unthinkably monstrous power known only as...Akira. And Akira is about to rise! Collected in six massive volumes, Akira has been reproduced in its original, black-and-white majesty as never-before-seen in an English-translated edition. If you love science fiction, manga or comics, Akira is the one work that must be represented in your collection!
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #262495 in Books
- Published on: 2000-12
- Released on: 2000-12-13
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Comic
- 364 pages
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Originally serialized in Japan between 1981 and 1993, Otomo's 2,000-plus-page science fiction epic Akira was reprinted as a monthly comic book in the U.S. in the early '90s. This new six-volume series is the first time it's appeared as an English-language graphic novel. Set in Tokyo 38 years after its destruction in World War III (which, according to this story, happened in 1992), Akira eventually evolves into a philosophical investigation of time. But this first volume is all action, nonstop car chases and gun fights strung together with exaggerated speed lines and lots of gigantic machinery. The complicated plot revolves around two teenagers in a motorbike gang that encounters a strange child with an old man's features. When one of the young bikers begins manifesting violent, supernatural powers that threaten to destroy him, both bikers find themselves enmeshed in a massive conflict between two sinister agencies (which both believe they're fighting to save the world) over some unnamed thing so terrifying it's locked away in a vault and frozen to absolute zero. Akira has been praised for "massively decompressed storytelling" a few seconds of story time can take pages and Otomo's hyperkinetic black-and-white drawings explode across the page. The translation is sometimes a bit awkward, although it still expresses the story's visceral force. The book has been adapted into an animated film that's a favorite among anime fans.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Customer Reviews
Not much to say about it...
Akira is simply amazing. The art is beautiful, the story is genius, the characters are incredibly likeable, and the themes are disturbingly cool. 'Nuff said.
a pinnacle of graphic art madness in the service of depicting a mad world
The entire series is an essential item in the library of any aspiring graphic artist or graphic novelist. This is my most important resource concerning the modern styles that predominate manga and anime today. Taking on the complete set, I expected to be blown to pieces but instead I found myself slow cooked in a pot, sliced into thin slivers over the course of a few weeks, and put back together again. If you can stand the pain, it turns out to be quite a ride. Perhaps because of their experience of being the only nation ever to suffer the effect of nuclear war, I suspect that the Japanese have mastered the depiction of post-apocalyptic dystopia. However, Japanese graphic art has a long history dating back hundreds of years. I am not surprised that this is an excellent example of visual elements taking charge of the storytelling where words provide the common ground on which you may stand with others in the audience. I suspect that even in its original language this work would captivate just the same. Perhaps not to the taste of many avid readers of graphic novels because of the sparse dialogue. Personally, I tend towards more graphic elements so this was a treat.
Graphic SF Reader
Akira is awesome. Even from a time when you would have just about had to commit a crime against the person of a Japanese tourist, or pay ridiculous amounts of money to get anime and manga and things like that, Akira was available.
It is no surprise that it was, as is an example of that artform at its finest.
Neo-Tokyo is a city recovering from devastation and world war.
When a young bikie gang leader rescues a young boy named Tetsuo, after almost running him down, Kaneda soon comes to realise this is no ordinary boy, because of the government interest in him.
