Akira Club (2007)

Although I haven't been reading many comics lately, I have been looking at some pretty pictures. And the pictures don't get much finer than in this comprehensive round up of images from the manga series Akira - the post-apocalypse never looked so good.

This book collects images cut from the collected editions as well as out-takes, preliminary sketches and merchandise associated with the comic and in a few cases the anime. The book is split into 4 sections:

Akira Illustrations: This contains cover illustrations from Young Magazine - the magazine that first published the serialised story in Japan - as well as cover illustrations from the collected editions.

Title-page Collection: This section contains the 120 title pages from the inside of the magazine that were omitted from the collected editions to prevent the break up of the narrative.

Memorial Gallery: This has images of the various items of merchandise produced during the publication of Akira such as promotional posters, toys and t-shirts.

Unpublished Works: The final section has some out-takes and examples of revisions made when creating the collected editions. Some of these show Otomo's quest for perfection as he makes artistic revisions to the original but some are examples of the process involved in converting the format from reading right to left to the western left to right. For example, a simple mirror image is not always desirable as the buttoning on jackets ends up looking wrong and so art revisions are required to correct and other oddities.

I loved this book as I love the art of Katsuhiro Otomo with its attention to the minutest detail. It made me want to go and dig my copies of the Epic series out of the loft and re-read them - it's been a while.

Manga is not something that I have read a lot of - apart from Akira I can only think of two other series that I have read completely and they are Nausicaa and Death Note. It should be something that I should be more into as the industry tends to have more pure sci-fi stories than the American comic companies. The trouble I find is with the saturation of the market now it can be hard to tell the good from the bad and, given the usual manga character drawing style, the serious from the juvenile. I bought the first few collection of Gantz recently to give it a try as it looked interesting but any recommendations for a more hard sci-fi series would be gratefully received.

First published on RevolutionSF on Wednesday Jul 13, 2011