I think you Vol 5 link is pointing to the wrong book.
I’ll file this with my other eagerly anticipated headlines :
The Sky! Is! Blue!
Astronomers confirm Jupiter is larger than a duck.
Hawaiian climate considered tolerable by most.
You don’t want the softbacks.
You want the much more collectable hardbacks, that’s what you want.
…right up to the point when you discover that they never did an English hardback of volume 6…
I find the suggestion that the books are more comprehensible than the movie to be somewhat exaggerated.
It seems I often hear people say that “the movie ends right when the manga is beginning!” but I’d say it’s more like they tell similar stories with a couple of vaguely similar events.
Also:
Over 2000 pages, the Akira series is a sci-fi epic
That’s surely puny for a manga, isn’t it?
That depends on how you look at it! Originally the purpose of this project…
It’s no Kaze no Tani no Naushikaa, that’s for sure.
It’s printed on big pages.
Not even joking, it wouldn’t work in smaller tankobon format. It would be unreadable.
I’m the kind of elitist who’s not happy withe the Dark Horse release of Akira because of the flipped artwork to accommodate a western left to right reading order. Would love to see a new version done with an updated translation and the original orientation on the artwork using the right to left reading order that anyone familiar
with manga has long become comfortable with.
Way back in the day that is exactly what Dark Horse did for Lone Wolf & Cub. Result was as you predicted.
Covet.
That’s surely puny for a manga, isn’t it?
It depends. From the point of serialized manga, 2000 pages is quite short. But Akira is not exactly a serialized manga. It tells one story (well, many, but all stories are interconnected in one arc). This is more similar to the “Graphic novel” or “BD album”.
Also, think that there is few filler in akira. Otomo’s style is very intricated, again, much more similar to european comics than japanese manga of the time. His drawings tend to be dense in details and with a very keen eye for the "cinematography"of the scene. This makes Akira a comic that sometimes is hard to read. There are few big vignettes, especially in the action scenes where usually the modern authors tend to embiggen and simplify.
So, from the point of view of Otomo, it was an epic task of extraordinary skill. To the point he never attempted again to write and draw a story so long: after Akira, he drew short stories for compilations (40-60 pages each) and wrote a couple of similar lenght ones (legend of mother sara ran for 7 volumes but was not drawn by Otomo). They’re saying that he wants to serialize a new long story, but I’ll believe when I see it.
I love the spanish edition of Akira. Instead of publishing it in “tankoubon” format (common for manga) they made an “integrale” version, with full-scale pages (european album size) and with only minimal touches (original reading direction, only a few sound effects redrawn in spanish for clarification). It’s expensive as hell (150€) but was a good inversion.
I haven’t read Akira, but if the manga’s anything like the film, then yes, it’d be practically herculean to get that much detail in to each of 2000 pages. I stand in awe of what I can only imagine to be mangled, broken hands afterward.
ETA: I say this as a complete artistic muggle. My artistic prowess tops out at the ability to draw stick figures. But you’d never be able to read the speech bubbles. I can’t. And the Akira film is a veritable feast for the eyes.
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