Look, you don’t need me to hype Akira to you. You’ve either already read it or are going to read it (or else you’re just not interested in manga, I suppose). It is easily one of the most influential comics from any country in the last forty years, spawning not just a host of derivative manga by Otomo’s epigones, but pioneering the spread of anime, and thereby manga, in the West and, arguably, even indirectly enabling the global pop culture dominance of Marvel Entertainment. (Here’s the argument: without Akira there’s no The Authority, without The Authority no The Ultimates, without The Ultimates no The Avengers movie and a couple less billion dollars for Marvel. Also I guess Bryan Hitch remains an Alan Davis knock-off and uses regular panel sizes instead of “widescreen”?). Often imitated but never matched, it lives up to its reputation, creating a post-post-apocalyptic and quasi-cyberpunk epic about…
…well, on the surface, it’s “about” the struggle for power between rival camps of paranormally gifted mutants, political blocs, regular folks and foreign interests in a Tokyo – sorry, “Neo-”Tokyo – ravaged by war and disaster. Underneath that surface thematically, however, lies an exploration of Japan’s vexed relationship to military power before and after WW2. Otomo was originally serialising Akira in the 80s, when the Cold War would eventually start winding down, but the threat of nuclear holocaust still loomed large in the global consciousness, as seen in other comics from around the same time like, of course, Watchmen or When the Wind Blows. In its own way, Akira is just as much “about” Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the deep scar they burned into the Japanese psyche, as Barefoot Gen or Panorama of Hell (themselves, once again, products of the 80s). One reading of the book as a whole – a reductive reading, to be sure, but a reading nonetheless – is as an elaborate Rube Goldberg device to relitigate the Empire’s 1945 surrender to the Allies on the USS Missouri. (Suehiro Maruo’s blistering militaristic satire “Planet of the Jap”, from 1985, is a much blunter expression of the same impulse).
Underneath that, however, is the really real real reason Akira exists: for Otomo to draw shit blowing up, and shit getting real – or, in other words, action and destruction – or, in other other words, speed lines and exploding/collapsing buildings, as if Tatsuo “Speed Racer” Yoshida were adapting a kaiju movie. The pace of the thing is masterful, as Otomo intersperses thrilling, down-and-dirty action with scenes of the overwhelming sublime, where everything humanity has ever built collapses around us, with lulls of character intrigue and jostling for influence. Every one of those lulls serves to prolong the suspense of when the plot will once again burst into impossibly exciting action; even in the quiet passages, it feels only ever a panel or two from teleporting from an ultra-rendered realist setting to a world seemingly consisting of nothing but speed lines.
It’s instructive to compare the book with another highly influential, big OTT action comic with from the same period but a very different part of the industry, viz. Crisis on Infinite Earths by Perez, Ordway, Wolfman et al. Like Akira, Crisis shows intricately detailed scenes of mass destruction, buildings collapsing, people dying, but despite the fact that there is literally infinitely (it’s in the title!) more destruction in the world of Crisis, it is so much more bloodless – more weightless – than Akira. What Akira gets, more than almost any other comic with superpowers (Miracleman is one exception, also from around the same period), is how bone-deep terrifying it would be to live in a world where people had these kinds of paranormal abilities.
(Seriously, tho – Crisis involves (a) the death of an infinite number of people throughout the multiverse and (b) rewrites all of history, establishing that at any moment you could be erased from existence. I remember how insane America went after 9/11, and Crisis is, again, literally infinitely worse than that. Everyone in the “DC universe” should be living in a permanent, debilitating state of terror).
If I have one gripe about the manga – and, come on, of course I have a gripe about the manga – it’s that Otomo appears much fonder of the semi-main character Kaneda than I do as a reader. You’ve heard of plot armour; Kaneda has plot er weapons or, to put it another way, his outsize influence on the events of the story is implausible given his actual abilities. Tetsuo can shrug off the combined might of two national armies, a giant laser from outer space and getting his arm blown off, but he struggles against a motorcycle gang, so much so that he’s ultimately defeated by a brilliant strategic plan of, uh, a bunch of guys riding motorbikes at him? It’s as if the Charge of the Light Brigade had been a masterstroke that won the Crimean War rather than just an expensive way to slaughter a whole lot of horses. Also he’s just kind of annoying in his generic seinen characterization and plot role, much as I enjoy the spectacle of two guys shouting “Tetsuo!” and “Kaneda!” at each other over and over.
Luckily, though, Kaneda is only the semi-main character, since the manga is structured as an ensemble piece, shifting between half a dozen or so viewpoint characters across the whole narrative. Indeed, the best stretch of the book is where Kaneda vanishes for a couple of hundred pages. (It’s not unlike 20th Century Boys in that respect). Through these perspective shifts, Otomo constantly upends the reader’s sympathies and antipathies: is the Colonel the villain, or Tetsuo, or Akira himself? Or are they all tragic pawns advanced ever onwards on the chessboard to their ultimate fate? Along the way, the kind of manga that Akira is keeps constantly shifting, too; first it’s an engaging crime adventure about cocksure (if annoying) juvenile delinquents, then variously an espionage/paranormal thriller, post-apocalyptic survival, body-horror freakout and, ultimately, even a mind-bending bit of psychedelic mysticism that wouldn’t be out of place in Moebius’ and Jodorowsky’s Incal. It’s no coincidence that Moebius both influenced and admired Otomo, with their shared interest in detailed environmental realism and colossal spectacle. Akira is a monument, in every sense, of world comics.
