Akira - Volume 1

Recently I took a look at the anime classic that broke down the doors to the western market and paved the way for thousands of others.  Today, we start our six part look at the epic length Manga that inspired it.


I'm not going to lie.  I'm going to put this right up front.  The manga version of Akira is a thousand miles better than the movie.

That's not to say the movie sucks.  It's an absolute classic of sci fi for a reason.  But the film is a deeply bare bones adaption of a story that fills six phone book length books.  It has a cast that would rival any HBO show.  Unlike the esoteric and strange plot of the film, this focuses on the intrigue and complexities of a government run program to create psychics and the chaos that follows when a variety of groups fight for control of those psychics.  The cataclysmic explosion that comes at the movies climax occurs at the halfway point of this story and the stakes continue to rise.

But we're here today to discuss the first volume.  The first half of the thick tome covers what occurs in the first fifteen minutes of the movie (with a few differences) in tight detail.  The focus is much tighter on Kaneda and his gang at first.  The fight with the clowns is shifted to later in the comic, with the early portion leading up to Tetsuo's crash taking place during a race through the burned out city.

The conflict with the Colonel and Ryu's group is also much more well developed and we see an early display of what happens when Takashi's powers get out of hand from a lack of the drug.  Council traitor Nezu also is introduced in a much more prominent but morally ambiguous role than his one in the films.  There is a real grey vs grey morality going on in the comic, much more so than in the film.

Viewers of the film might be shocked at the way the hero Kaneda treats his nurse lover, using her to source drugs and laughing at being told that she's pregnant.

The comic also spends a lot more time with the clowns, villains who are barely developed in the movie, but here take on a much more important role as Tetsuo takes them over after gaining his psychic powers and becomes their drug addled leader, behaving in such a monstrous manner that the rest of the gangs unite to stop him in this volumes blistering climax.

Tetsuo's relationship with Kaneda feels less developed in the comic, which is surprising considering how much of a strenuous theme it was in the movie.  But that's perhaps the central difference.  The comics are about the psychics and the possibilities proposed by them and the different organisations that vie for control of them.  The movie chooses to ignore most of this to focus on the relationship between Kaneda and Tetsuo.  It doesn't make either worse than the other.  But in terms of an intricately plotted tale, I'll always find myself preferring the manga. 

Posted in: Akira, Kaneda, Manga, Manga Review, Tetsuo