Manga of the Month- September

I shall take this precious blog space to vent out my fandom towards the best graphic novel in all History: 'Akira' by Katsuhiro Otomo.

Like all brilliant works of literature, art and film, Akira is a manga that actually doesn't make much sense, I could read all 6 heavy volumes 3 times and still not understand what the message is meant to be.

Being such a brilliant manga it is also difficult to describe the storyline, but I'll take a stab at trying anyway. Set in the future, a givernment organisation held scientific experiements on young children, often leading to death, one of them thrives, however, the power etched into this young child's mind is too great to control, without knowing, the organisation had created an uncontrollable unconscious monster: his name is Akira, he is then frozen in time for 30 years in order to maintain national security.

Meanwhile, Kaneda, a 15 year old boy, has some unusual occurrences surrounding him, one of which was the loss of his rather jealous friend, Tetsuo. Who ended up becoming addicted to an unkown powerful drgug, resulting in his mental and phsycial deformities in addition to its powerful potential. Tetsuo then unleashes akira in a bid to take over japan and eventually the world.
My little summery might sound lame and really does not reflect a tenth of the awsomeness of this series so I urge you to try and find out about it yourselves.

Of all the manga I will ever talk about, I seriously think people should not keep going on living life without reading this one. It is that amazing.

The success of Akira was not only limited to Japan, it was THE manga that changed the face of France and America by exemplifying a part of modern Japanese culture. They and other countried in europe now hold a strong esteem of manga, resulting in their widespread selling potential and the prescence of manga volumes in virtually every book store in France, europe and America. It is unfortunately Britain who are rather slow on the uptake and conservative in their views of sturdy newspapers than graphic novels.

Now onto the drawing style of Akira: the mangaka cannot draw women to save his life in my personal opinion, all the female character's looked like men... but you kind of get over that while reading the volumes as you get used to the drawing style. Women are the only flaw that Otomo has in his style of drawing, due to the countless scenes of destruction and the setting in the future, Otomo has exemplified how creative and imaginative his drawings can be; they take size and detail to the limit and I remeber being consumed by awe as I read some of of the pages and just wonder how on earth he had drawn it all.

Overall, Akira is a must read, despite the prediction that you will be rather confused by the end of it all, the drawing style, plot and issues of power, corruption and governmental control wll blow your mind away :D However, like most of the manga I seem to review about, it is not ment for childrens' eyes, it does have some mature content in one of the volumes and if you're not fussy about strong violence, then everything else is okay.