DJ Kenobi
02-24-2005, 11:13 PM
Akira: Volumes 1-6
By Katsuhiro Otomo
Warning: There are some spoilers in here. Read at your own discretion.
I finally got around to reading Akira. I was always missing a volume, or didn’t think I’d have time to read it straight through, or some other excuse. But I finally read all 6 volumes in the past 2 days and it was absolutely amazing. The art is astoundingly gorgeous. I can’t praise it enough. What struck me most was Otomo’s pacing and storytelling. I never thought I’d be able to say this about something, but the last 1000 pages just fly by at a breakneck pace. To keep the story moving so fast with so many characters and so many plotlines is the real amazing aspect of Akira, IMHO. Yes, the art is beautiful. Yes, the story is not only captivating plot wise, but the characters excellent. On top of all that though, a 2000+ page story that really reads as one cohesive piece is a true testament to impeccable plotting.
One comparison I couldn’t help but make while reading Akira was to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, for obvious reasons. Otomo seems to go one step further than Shelley though, increasing the moral ambiguity of the characters while decreasing the direct didacticism of story itself. There is even less of a sense of good versus evil in Akira than in Frankenstein. Shelley’s book seems to set out to teach Dr. Frankenstein a lesson, that all life is precious, and she uses the “monster” as her rod to beat that into him. But in the end, the world is not changed. Dr. Frankenstein is dead and the creature leaves, to burn himself and his creator atop a funeral pyre in the arctic. The book remains as the “text” for the lesson the good doctor learns, and therefore we are supposed to learn. However in Akira, effective change is a constant. Neo-Tokyo is destroyed multiple times, the geo-political climate of much of the world is changed, and even the moon does not escape unscathed. Yet, is there a lesson to learn from Akira? Are we intended to learn the lesson that Dr. Frankenstein intends the ship captain and his biographer, Walton, to learn? That uncontrolled ambition leads to self-destruction? That reading is very possible from Akira, as the government that creates Tetsuo and Akira is destroyed by their creations. Yet Kaneda is just as ambitious and ends up leading what remains of the Great Tokyo Empire at the end. He gets the girl, gets the bike, and gets the city. The only price he pays is the lives of his friends Tetsuo and Yamagata. This sort of character development goes across the board in Akira. The Colonel is the bad guy for the first half the series, then a neutral, an ally, and finally retires into obscurity. Characters are controlled by their personalities and their history, not by the artifice of good versus evil. This is quite the achievement for an epic story, which by nature usually requires a villain and a hero.
Akira is a story of building through deconstruction, making it for me, the best piece of postmodern literature I’ve read.
By Katsuhiro Otomo
Warning: There are some spoilers in here. Read at your own discretion.
I finally got around to reading Akira. I was always missing a volume, or didn’t think I’d have time to read it straight through, or some other excuse. But I finally read all 6 volumes in the past 2 days and it was absolutely amazing. The art is astoundingly gorgeous. I can’t praise it enough. What struck me most was Otomo’s pacing and storytelling. I never thought I’d be able to say this about something, but the last 1000 pages just fly by at a breakneck pace. To keep the story moving so fast with so many characters and so many plotlines is the real amazing aspect of Akira, IMHO. Yes, the art is beautiful. Yes, the story is not only captivating plot wise, but the characters excellent. On top of all that though, a 2000+ page story that really reads as one cohesive piece is a true testament to impeccable plotting.
One comparison I couldn’t help but make while reading Akira was to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, for obvious reasons. Otomo seems to go one step further than Shelley though, increasing the moral ambiguity of the characters while decreasing the direct didacticism of story itself. There is even less of a sense of good versus evil in Akira than in Frankenstein. Shelley’s book seems to set out to teach Dr. Frankenstein a lesson, that all life is precious, and she uses the “monster” as her rod to beat that into him. But in the end, the world is not changed. Dr. Frankenstein is dead and the creature leaves, to burn himself and his creator atop a funeral pyre in the arctic. The book remains as the “text” for the lesson the good doctor learns, and therefore we are supposed to learn. However in Akira, effective change is a constant. Neo-Tokyo is destroyed multiple times, the geo-political climate of much of the world is changed, and even the moon does not escape unscathed. Yet, is there a lesson to learn from Akira? Are we intended to learn the lesson that Dr. Frankenstein intends the ship captain and his biographer, Walton, to learn? That uncontrolled ambition leads to self-destruction? That reading is very possible from Akira, as the government that creates Tetsuo and Akira is destroyed by their creations. Yet Kaneda is just as ambitious and ends up leading what remains of the Great Tokyo Empire at the end. He gets the girl, gets the bike, and gets the city. The only price he pays is the lives of his friends Tetsuo and Yamagata. This sort of character development goes across the board in Akira. The Colonel is the bad guy for the first half the series, then a neutral, an ally, and finally retires into obscurity. Characters are controlled by their personalities and their history, not by the artifice of good versus evil. This is quite the achievement for an epic story, which by nature usually requires a villain and a hero.
Akira is a story of building through deconstruction, making it for me, the best piece of postmodern literature I’ve read.