About the Mangaka
Otomo Katsuhiro debuted in 1973 with Jusei, Akira was started in 1982 and propelled him to the international stage. And revolutionised the way manga was drawn. He followed this up with a move into animation, including doing an adaptation of Akira, that like the manga became a world wide hit. From there it was a small jump into live action movies, the first, Mushishi has been well received and was entered into the Venice Film Festival.
(abbreviated from the back of Akira volume 01)
About the Manga
What a pile of trash, no, that’s insulting to trash. I’ve never read a volume of manga that was this bad, and I’ve read some crappy stuff over the years. Hell this volume makes the worst OEL look like a work of art.
If you haven’t guessed, I really hated this volume, it has everything I hate in a series and nothing I like.
First, it’s flipped!! I thought that Kodansha would have released un-flipped stuff, I mean that would make sense. Mot only are they a japanese company, but the manga fanbase has already forced the other publishers to release un-flipped stuff. I mean we want our manga to be un-flipped!! For some reason however (more on this later) they went with a flipped format.
We have a few colour pages, and while I usually like these, this time I felt they were pretty crap. Only the last one was any good, and frankly that just means it was better than others. The colours were fuzzy, and a bit washed out, lacking any sort of vibrancy.
Now onto the meat, what’s so damn good about this guys art? How the hell was it revolutionary? Granted I was still a sprog when this first came out in Japan, so I can’t really say whether it was revolutionary or not, but I found it pretty well, crap.
I will admit that at times Otomo can draw well, some of his background designs are pretty awesome. However they just get bogged down in how bad the rest of the art is.
The character designs are average, but I feel this tied with the rest of the crap art makes them abysmal. Over the course of the volume the character designs went through phases of average to awful, and none being really any good. I also noticed a lot of inconsistencies in them, true they weren’t large differences, but they were enough to make a difference (fatter faces, longer faces, taller and shorter etc etc)
I probably wouldn’t have been so bothered by that if I’d been able to like any other aspects of the art, and visa versa.
Unfortunately the story also fails. The core of the story I’ll admit is pretty interesting, and has a lot of potential. However Otomo stumbles along with an inept way of telling the story. As the volume progressed I got more and more confused over what was going on. Granted it made more sense on the second read through, but I felt that part of the problem lay in the way he wrote the story. Also, admittedly part of the problem lies in me not being a huge fan of cyber-punk in general.
While it’s certainly true that the series still has time to change and strengthen it’s weaknesses (and I’ve seen a lot of series do just that), for a title to be this bad from someone who was supposedly a professional with a number of other released titles already, doesn’t give me a lot of hope.
The biggest failure however is on the part of Kodansha. Basically what you have here is a rip off of the Dark Horse version, and when I say rip off I mean carbon copy. Everything is the same, all they’ve done is removed the Dark Horse logo and added their own.
The translations are the same, the placement of the SFX’s even the cover is the same. Kodansha really haven’t done anything to this other than rebranding, and yet they expect it to sell.
This is also why the series is still flipped, since Dark Horse released this as flipped way back in the day. This is depressing to say the least, and anyone expecting a new translation or something special to justify the cost, are in for a huge let down.
That’s the other fail element as well, the cost of this volume is insane, over double the price of a normal manga. $25 in the USA, $30 in Canada, and £18 in the UK. While it’s true that most shops sell at a reduced price, this still costs more than it should, and to much more considering what it is.
The final fail is the size. It’s a whopping 24.9 x 17.8 x 3cm, which when compared with an average manga volume: 19 x 13 x 1.5cm you can see the difference. It’s seriously oversized, and not easy to carry around. A better size would have been along the lines of Tokyopop’s Jyu-oh Sei: 19 x 13.2 x 3cm, which while being rather thick, was at least a manageable size for carrying.
Overall, this goes on my junk pile, and is highly unlikely to ever come off. Will I buy future volumes? Hell no!! I won’t waste my money on buying this release. If you really want the series I recommend the Dark Horse version, which is still readily available and costs considerably less (and is the exactly the same, size and all)
Where to Buy
