Akira Review

Otomo draws hard surfaces better than anyone has before or since. Overpasses, stadium concrete, service tunnels and the specific way a tower folds when its supports fail are rendered with an engineer's understanding, and the famous expansion sequences work because the reader has been shown exactly what is being destroyed. His motion is equally precise.

A bike drifts across a spread on a legible arc with the camera locked in place, which is why the opening chase still looks modern. Tetsuo is the strongest character work, a resentful boy handed unlimited power who uses it first on the friends who patronised him, and his physical dissolution is one of the medium's great sustained images.

The back half is where it slips. Once the city is levelled the story fragments into militias, cults, foreign fleets and a psychic council, the tone flattens into incident, and characters wander through sequences that no longer accumulate. The ending gestures at transcendence without earning it. Reader consensus rates it high rather than supreme, which is fair, and its historical importance for the Western market is nevertheless hard to overstate.