AKIRA ...manga, motorcycles, mutants...Oh My!

A is for...AKIRA. For 2023 we're reading our way through the alphabet!

AKIRA, the seminal Japanese cyberpunk post-apocalyptic manga series written and illustrated by Katsuhiro Otomo. This revolutionary Japanese comic ran from 1982 to 1990, serialized biweekly in Kodansha's seinen manga magazine Young Magazine, with its 120 chapters collected into six tankōbon volumes. The work had an outsized influence on not just comics east and west, but its landmark anime film adaptation from 1988 shaped a generation of storytellers. Almost across between Blade Runner meets Mad Max — with a little bit of 2001 A Space Odyssey thrown in, the FILM Akira was listed as one of the 10 essential animations. And it wasn't until the early 2000s that Dark Horse finally adapted the original manga for western audiences like us to READ.

Akira takes place some 30 years after the 1988 Japanese government atomic bombing of Tokyo after ESP experiments on children go awry. . Kaneda, the leader of a Japanese youth biker gang — and his pal Tetsuo are cruising the border of OLD Tokyo, where they have an strange encounter, which leaves Tetsuo hospitalized. Tetsuo is whiskey-a-go-go'ed away to a secret government project and Kaneda finds himself subsequently battling anti-government activists, greedy politicians, irresponsible scientists and a powerful military leader. Ultimately, Tetsuo's supernatural powers manifest, and all hell breaks loose. The action culminates at the site of the modern day Tokyo Olympiad exposing the experiment's secrets.

Otomo has stated that Akira reflects the essence of his views toward life and death, and the world which surrounds us. And joining us to help us make sense of the world which surrounds us (or at least this comic), is the very man who introduced Ryan & Raman oh so long ago, the one and only Bob Arnold, who apparantly named his cat after the lead character in Akira, who is really Canadian.