The Impact of Akira E-Book

Rémi Lopez

• Herausgeber: Third Editions
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 304

Beschreibung

Discover Katsuhiro Otomo’s visionary work and post-Akira Japanese comic culture.

The catalyst of an era, of a world that was unaware of its downfall, Katsuhiro Otomo’s visionary work marked a turning point in the industry. First, in his homeland, Japan, in terms of graphics and plot on an entire generation of post-Akira artists who adopted his attention to detail, his realism and his dizzying views. But above all with his international reach, which threw Japanese comic strips and animations into the limelight in numerous countries, by trampling the rest of the world’s notion that cartoons are exclusively for children. This book dives headfirst into the radioactive culture that is the creative power of Katsuhiro Otomo, from the mangaka’s— already explosive—beginnings, up to winning recognition for Akira. Discover the themes and influences of this fundamentally anti-establishment work by exploring its socio-economic or simply literary aspects. The author of the work analyzes the phenomenon, from its tiny seed to the mighty tree, and reveals why Akira is, above all, a purely Japanese series.

This book will provide you with an analysis of the socio-historical context of Akira. It aims to help Western readers to better understand the escence of this graphic and narrative treasure.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rémi Lopez graduated with a degree in Japanese from Bordeaux III University. In 2004, he cut his teeth as an author when he wrote website columns on video game soundtracks. Two years later, he joined the Gameplay RPG magazine in which he carried out the same task. He then followed the then editor-in-chief, Christophe Brondy, and his entire team to a new project: the monthly Role Playing Game magazine. Rémi wrote The Legend of Final Fantasy VIII and the book on the Original Soundtrack for Pix'n Love publications in 2013.

Leseprobe

Cover

Title

For Lou S.

THE IMPACT OFAKIRA

A MANGA [R]EVOLUTION

1.0: Preface

DEFYING the orders of an authority they prefer to mock, the motor-cycle gang and their young, charismatic leader Kaneda set off to admire the alarming crater that launched World War III. This scar of history is as gaping as it is gloomy. The crater is a symbol of death but also of rebirth, for next to Kaneda stands a concrete monster twinkling with millions of lights, a new Babylon dubbed Neo-Tokyo. In the turmoil of a nascent civil war, Kaneda and his comrades ride their high-tech motor-cycles to the tune of their own despair, finding meaning in self-destructive gratification and gang wars that make their drug-tainted blood boil.

It is widely agreed that Akira divided the world of manga into a before and an after. This is true for several reasons. First, because the work of Katsuhiro Otomo–with its incredible detail, realism, and dizzying perspectives–inspired an entire generation of young artists. Second, because Akira helped create an international market for manga, and more generally for Japanese animation, by trampling the rest of the world’s notion that cartoons are exclusively for children. Finally, because anyone who has read or seen Akira does not come out of the experience unscathed. The initiated are shocked, seduced, disgusted, excited, or completely fascinated. So much so, that more than thirty-five years after Akira’s first chapter was published in Young Magazine, the work’s provocative nature continues to exert its influence on generation after generation, from Japan to Hollywood, passing through France, which was one of the first countries to open its arms to manga before becoming its second largest global consumer behind Japan.

The aim of this book is to present Akira from an intensely Japanese perspective. We will begin by revisiting the career of Katsuhiro Otomo, whose works prior to Akira remain relatively unknown outside of his archipelago. We will attempt to better understand the artist’s magnum opus by exploring its broader historical context: a time when science-fiction manga was experiencing a rebirth, many years after Osamu Tezuka’s Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy) and Mitsuteru Yokoyama’s Tetsujin 28-go, the latter serving as an inspiration for Akira.

We will primarily explore Akira through the socio-historical echo of its many themes: the memory of the Pacific Wars, the trauma of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the student revolts of the late sixties, the worrisome speed of local economic progress, the culture of the so-called bosozoku bikers, the necessary and logical emergence of cyberpunk in Japan, etc. Such an approach is essential if we are to fully understand the “Japaneseness” of Katsuhiro Otomo’s manga.

So, let’s revisit the impact of Akira, the manga series that turned everything on its head.

About the Author:

Rémi Lopez holds a B.A. in Japanese culture and civilization. His interest in RPGs dates back to childhood. This passion has endured: at age seventeen, he wrote his very first articles for the specialized magazines Gameplay RPG and Role Playing Game, after having made his debut on the Internet as a gaming enthusiast. A great admirer of Jung, Campbell, and Eliade, he launched his career as an author, writing two Final Fantasy books published by Third Éditions. The first, in 2013, dealt with the franchise’s eighth episode while the second, in 2015, explored the universe of Ivalice. He has since coauthored two more works devoted to the Persona saga. Rémi Lopez has also written Cowboy Bebop: Deep Space Blues and The Legend of Chrono Trigger, also published by Third Éditions.

THE IMPACT OFAKIRA

A MANGA [R]EVOLUTION

1.1: Creation: Conception

“When my publishers approached me about having my work translated for publication abroad, I was admittedly skeptical. Akira was created for Japanese readers in a Japanese context. I wondered what a Western or American audience could possibly get out of it. Obviously, I was wrong. […] I wrote the story a long time ago, but hindsight allows me to look at it more objectively. It’s an anti-establishment work. The fact that other artists continue to draw inspiration from Akira undoubtedly means that the work remains relevant today.”

Katsuhiro Otomo, 20161

Thirty-seven years after its first chapter was published, Akira still provokes. In the world of pop culture, Katsuhiro Otomo’s influence is undeniable. A tribute to subversion, Akira’s themes and cyberpunk atmosphere seem to increasingly embody today’s world. The present and future are closing in on one another, almost to the point of merging: aren’t the 2020 Olympic Games scheduled to take place in Tokyo, like in Otomo’s manga series? Mightn’t we see clandestine motorcycle races and monster demonstrations repressed by the police?

Akira is a mixture of both the universal and the specifically Japanese, a rich cocktail of varied influences reflecting the career of its genius author. Curious by nature, Otomo has an insatiable interest in other cultures, although his body of work prior to Akira still remains relatively unknown outside of Japan. And yet within Japan, Otomo was regarded as one of the truly great manga artists well before Akira’s publication. He spearheaded a new generation that would push back the boundaries of their creative medium. Otomo is not a troublemaker: he is a dissident. Everything he does, he does of his own accord. At a time when publishers had not yet appropriated all of the industry’s decision-making powers, he made his own choices, never worrying about the opinions of others. The artist thus permitted himself a great deal of freedom during his formative years. Before the immense success of Akira, he boldly experimented with various registers, from the noir to the absurd and from the tender to the distasteful. No one could say that his work had been rehashed. According to Otomo, his curiosity stems from a personal desire: “Most people probably want to express everything that they have inside, but guys like me want to do something totally new every time. Maybe it’s more important to value your own ideas.” And Otomo sowed his ideas in dozens of short stories for almost a decade before embarking on what would become his most celebrated work: Akira. Otomo’s influence on both science fiction and the cyberpunk movement–which, in the early 1980s, needed pillars on which to build itself–was significant. But even more importantly, the work of the man who created Akira was decisive for an entire generation of manga artists. He was the silent figurehead of the manga revival, an idea that is supported by Hisashi Eguchi, one of Otomo’s collaborators: “Back then, there were only a few manga artists being hailed as part of this movement called the New Wave. But, as far as I was concerned, Otomo was the only true New Wave artist.”

Katsuhiro Otomo was born on April 14, 1954 in the former city of Hasama, now part of Tome, in the Miyagi Prefecture. Since it was essentially a rural area, Otomo spent a good deal of his childhood binging on manga. He read the great classics, which included Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy) written by Osamu Tezuka–often referred to as “the god of manga”– as well as Mitsuteru Yokoyama’s Tetsujin 28-go and Jiro Kuwata’s 8 Man: shonen manga that soon became legendary as each release was devoured by Otomo’s generation. But for Otomo, reading was essentially a solitary activity. As the only boy among both younger and older sisters, he was regularly given manga that he read in seclusion, sometimes copying his idols’ illustrations, before being able to buy it on his own (but no more than one per month, that was the rule). He also had the opportunity to witness the emergence of the very first Japanese animated feature films at a very young age: thirty years before his adaptation of Akira made audiences shiver in darkened theaters, Taiji Yabushita’s Hakujaden (Panda and the Magic Serpent, 1958) and Tezuka’s Saiyuki (Alakazam the Great, 1960) filled his young mind with wonder. When his favorite series were adapted into weekly anime broadcasts for the masses, Otomo’s passion took on a new dimension. No longer did he have to go to the cinema to see motion pictures, he could watch his heroes’ adventures at home on TV.

Otomo’s reading preferences evolved along with those of his generation. As the core audience targeted by Tezuka and other artists grew older, the market naturally evolved, creating a demand for teenage, and even adult, manga. And while Otomo’s interest in shonen did not entirely wane, his entry into adolescence triggered the need for more explosive content. This came in the form of gekiga, which literally translates into “dramatic pictures.” Rather than being considered a subgenre of manga (i.e. “humorous pictures”), gekiga is generally considered a genre in its own right. Although the two are similar, gekiga is more realistic and less “cartoonish.” Unapologetic in its display of brute force and violence, it is characterized by much darker graphics. We owe the term gekiga to one of its greatest artists, Yoshihiro Tatsumi. He baptized the new genre as early as 1957, after parents were outraged by the presence of such illustrations next to innocent children’s issues. The ensuing confusion subsequently lead to the labeling of these adult manga series.2 Created in 1964 by Sanpei Shirato (Sasuke, the Kamui Series), Garo3 was the flagship magazine for this new genre. It featured various artists: not only Tatsumi, but also the enigmatic Yoshiharu Tsuge and the brilliant Shigeru Mizuki (GeGeGe no Kitaro aka Kitaro of the Graveyard), whose meticulous designs were particularly appreciated by Otomo. Even Osamu Tezuka, a shrewd entrepreneur as well as a great artist, jumped on the gekiga bandwagon by publishing COM, his very own magazine dedicated to avant-garde manga, in 1967. It was in these very pages that the young Otomo discovered a new type of manga. This discovery enabled him to envision the possibility of using manga to say something, to get various messages across and paint a vitriolic picture of the world’s harshness. Later, he explained that the change was inevitable: “When my generation started making manga in the 1970s, we were reading Ashita no Joe and Kyojin no Hoshi, and the stories just kept getting darker. Even in other genres, it was a strange time: film had its own New Wave, while drama had Shuji Terayama and the Black Tent Troupe. In the midst of all that, it was a foregone conclusion that manga would also become dark and moody.” Beyond its subject matter, gekiga’s gloomy atmosphere came from its settings and their great narrative value. If the plot revolved around a hard-boiled detective, for example, the dirty, poorly-lit nighttime neighborhoods and rain set the tone. There is no doubt that Otomo’s work was significantly influenced by gekiga and the emphasis it placed on atmosphere. Very early on, he endeavored to turn his settings into characters in their own right.

Otomo had not yet taken any drawing lessons, and the future manga artist’s scribbles lacked genuine professionalism. It wasn’t until he discovered Shotaro Ishinomori’s didactic book Mangaka Nyumon (which can be roughly translated as Introduction to Becoming a Manga Artist) that Otomo, then a schoolboy, began to take his passion more seriously. This work, published in 1965, became a bible for the budding artist, as it did for many young illustrators of his age. Otomo was indeed a big fan of Ishinomori (Cyborg 009, Sarutobi Ecchan aka Hela Supergirl), whose high school he even attended! As his ambition grew, Otomo assiduously followed Ishinomori’s instructions and honed his craft. Only then did he take the plunge and begin illustrating his own stories. At age fifteen, he participated in a talent contest organized by Shonen Sunday magazine. He submitted five pages of a work entitled Sogeki. Similar to Takao Saito’s Golgo 13, it was the tale of an assassin for hire, and he received an honorable mention. Otomo’s attempts before age nineteen were failures despite regular professional encouragement; COM magazine even published a page of his Umi ga… in its February 1971 issue. In December of the same year, he penned what can be considered his first major “work, ” an adaptation of Andersen’s The Little Match Girl, which took up over sixty pages, two of which were unearthed by the magazine Pafu in 1979, in an issue celebrating the artist’s career.

Otomo’s entry into high school was synonymous with important changes in the young man’s life, as his growing interest in cinema gradually pushed him down new artistic paths. During these years, Otomo went to as many feature films as possible. No matter how long the train ride to Sendai took, he was adamant about seeing his favorite directors’ works. Despite his young age, he had a penchant for directors who were beloved by film buffs but not necessarily known for their accessibility. Among these were Luis Buñuel, who made the controversial film Un Chien Andalou (aka An Andalusian Dog – 1929), Frank Capra, the great Ingmar Bergman, Sergei Eisenstein, and French film director Julien Duvivier. Otomo soon became interested in bold, experimental cinema–he still enjoys watching Federico Fellini’s films when he is overwhelmed by fatigue–but this did not prevent him from appreciating the classic works of Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu, and Japanese cinema in general. He particularly enjoys provocative, avant-garde movies, especially those of Shohei Imamura, whose praises he has always sung.4 And it is this seductively subversive quality, this art of overturning codes, that he ultimately appreciated in the cinematic movement that truly influenced him: that of New Hollywood.

The New Hollywood movement was spearheaded by a counterculture that could taste its own freedom. Its passionate and ambitious directors were determined to redefine cinema, while pushing its boundaries, both in terms of its substance and its mode of production. Beginning in the mid-1960s, an entire generation of young directors came to prominence in the United States. They did not recognize themselves in the tired Hollywood machine of their era, which was lacking not only in inspiration but also success. Otomo’s free spirit was echoed in the aimless journeys of Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969), in the suicidal and tragic duo of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in the legendary Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967) and, above all, in the hymn to peace and independence that was Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock documentary (1970), whose three-hour run time5 immersed viewers in the human warmth of the world’s most famous rock festival. The young Otomo no longer thought of films or manga in the same way. Life itself, by his own admission, had taken on new meaning. Otomo discovered a certain pleasure in seeing characters with glaring weaknesses, magnificent anti-heroes waging losing battles, an echo, perhaps, of the student revolts that were taking place all over the world at that time, and especially in Japan (a movement that failed after the renewal of the Japan-US Security Treaty in 1970, as we will later see). Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971), which admittedly isn’t to everyone’s taste, also left a profound mark on Otomo due to its crescendo of raw, unspeakable violence, not to mention the unveiling of its protagonists’ true nature. All of these films also revolved around the longing to “pack up and leave town,” a desire that the future manga artist had shared for quite some time.

And despite cinema’s increasing pull, Otomo continued to draw. His style began to evolve as new influences took hold: “When I was younger, I tried to draw very traditional manga-like art. I tried to imitate Astro Boy and stuff like that. But, when I was in high school, the illustrations of people like Yokoo Tadanori and Isaka Yoshitaro became quite popular, and I ended up really appreciating their artistic styles. I decided that I wanted to adopt it for my own manga. I wanted to create characters using this type of approach, rather than sticking to the classic style. I wanted my manga to have more of an illustration feel to it, I suppose.”

Otomo was planning on moving to Tokyo despite his parents’ warnings that he was too young to leave home. What would he do for money? Why give up on going to art school? According to Otomo, he found that route dismally academic. And anyway, moving to Tokyo at age nineteen, well that was something every manga artist did! Otomo was looking for something more honest, a rawer form of expression than the one promised by classical channels: meeting the authors at COM was one of his goals. At the time, many of his contemporaries were eking out a living by creating seishun manga, slices of life about ordinary young people, often forced to work hard to meet ends meet. The sincerity of this type of manga appealed to a certain type of audience. During his high school years, Otomo had met an editor from Futabasha through a mutual friend (the manga artist Moribi Murano). The editor in question worked for the magazine Manga Action, created in 1967 and considered the first real seinen magazine (featuring works like Lupin III by Monkey Punch and Lone Wolf and Cub by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima). Surprised by the quality of Otomo’s drawings, the editor, who was based in Tokyo, suggested that they get in touch once the young man graduated from high school. This proposal did not fall on deaf ears. Otomo was recruited after just one phone call.

Following a visit to Nippori, where he succeeded in securing lodging with friends, Otomo moved to the Saitama Prefecture, in what was then the small town of Minami-Urawa, a stone’s throw from Tokyo, where many of the town’s inhabitants went to work early in the morning. According to Otomo, “Minami-Urawa was fascinating. There were lots of little bars nearby, and bars in a place like Minami-Urawa, Saitama tend to be run by and for folks from the regions. So there were people who looked like yakuza, the odd pervy-looking gangster type… a really intriguing bunch. I was only there for four years, but it was quite an education, I can tell you.” Otomo’s careful observation of the people around him served as one of his major sources of inspiration. Rather than prolonged encounters, it was the little things, the details, that were important to the artist: “Although there’s a point in time when I create stories in my head, my initial ideas come to me when I go out to people-watch, at a bookstore, a CD shop, a bar, and so forth. […] In my early twenties I often took the train to catch a movie. But I almost enjoyed observing the person seated opposite me on the train more than I did watching the film. ‘His shoes are worn out, so maybe he’s a traveling salesman’ or ‘he’s a bit pale, so he’s probably really tired’–carrying on this vein, I could imagine anyone’s work life. And watching children in the park, perhaps I’d think: ‘it’s kids’ clumsiness that makes them so cute.’ This is how a story emerges, how a manga series develops. I think it’s the same for musicians who really ‘connect’ with their music.”

In August 1973, Katsuhiro Otomo finally saw his first story, Jusei aka Gun Report, published in Manga Action (he also created the cover of this issue). The story, however, wasn’t an original: it was a rather loose adaptation of Mateo Falcone, a novella by the French writer Prosper Mérimée (subtitled The Ways of Corsica) published in 1829. Otomo was barely nineteen years old at the time and, although his style still lacked character, one could already see his penchant for detail (especially in his settings) not to mention a very cinematographic audacity in terms of both viewing angles and framing. Because the young artist attached great importance to both illustration and film, his manga had to appropriate their domain-specific languages to fit his images. Otomo published four other stories that same year. Among these were Shinyu, based on Edgar Allen Poe’s short story William Wilson, and Sumairii Ojisan, an adaptation of Mark Twain’s The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.

It wasn’t uncommon for the manga artists of Otomo’s generation–and generations prior–to look to European and American fiction. The beginning of the twentieth century saw the development of kyoyo-shugi in Japan, a movement that established culture (kyoyo), which included prestigious Western literature, as a fundamental instrument of healthy (and yes, elite) personal development. The first manga artists were the heirs of this philosophy, as Eiji Oguma has pointed out: “Outstanding manga artists referenced kyoyo-shugi in their memoirs. People like Fujio Akatsuka, Shotaro Ishinomori, and Fujiko Fujio recounted their extensive exposure to European and American films and literature while residing in the Tokiwa-So apartment house (famous for the number of young manga artists who lived there in the 1950s). According to an interview with Akatsuka, when they visited the famous manga artist Osamu Tezuka, the latter told them, ‘If you want to become great manga artists, don’t read manga. It’s more important that you watch first-rate films, listen to first-rate music, read first-rate books, and see first-rate theater performances.’ Akatsuka often adapted short stories by Charles Dickens and the like, while Ishinomori’s tales were inspired by European and American science fiction and panels dedicated to the adaptation of European films.”6

Otomo’s early career essentially consisted of short publications, sufficiently spaced out in time so as to avoid high expectations. Given his young age and audacity, the artist’s talent was indeed promising, but nothing seemed to point to the success he would ultimately enjoy. Many thought that his artwork’s realistic sobriety and lack of pizazz would condemn him to oblivion, a fate shared by numerous manga artists. During a conference held in 2008, Kentaro Takekuma explained that these traits were not shortcomings originating from a lack of inspiration, but rather deliberate choices intended to give a certain “crispness” to Otomo’s work: “We can view these early Otomo sketches, with their subdued art and scripts, as the antithesis to gekiga, which was at the height of its popularity during this time. […] [Otomo’s manga] followed the realistic art tradition that the gekiga movement started, while boldly rejecting the expressionistic techniques that it developed (panel frames extending beyond the page, super-dense motion lines, standardized poses during action scenes, and so on).” This idea echoes Otomo’s perspective in a 1988 interview, when he’d gained enough hindsight to better understand his career: “At the time, neither I nor any of my companions had our eyes set on the big magazines. Truth be told, we didn’t even aspire to create particularly interesting or amusing works (laughs). We weren’t overly concerned with plots, endings, or the like. We were quite enthusiastic about the idea of using manga to show how we lived and what we were thinking. I guess in those days, we saw manga as a genre akin to literature. Drawing manga is about expressing oneself, so back then artists and their work were highly idiosyncratic. That was when the manga world was at its most robust.” Another aspect of Otomo’s art that tended to distinguish him from others–and perhaps one of the most easily recognizable–was his preference for fine-nibbed pens. Gekiga artists frequently used the G-pen, a thick-nibbed pen that enabled them to draw exaggerated features and flesh out their characters. This was partly what gave the genre its dark and occasionally grimy look. A much finer nibbed-pen, the maru-pen, was then used to sharpen the details, as well as the background and setting. Otomo used the maru-pen for absolutely everything, and he was criticized for doing so. Many people thought his drawings were too “flat” and that his characters failed to stand out. But that was precisely the point: to make the hero a full-fledged actor, thus integrating both man and plot.

Otomo’s manga also demonstrated his indifference to climactic endings. As in Easy Rider, narratives don’t necessarily conclude with the resolution of a problem–assuming there is one! Instead, they often end abruptly, with no accountability to the reader/viewer. In this respect, they imitate life. And although gekiga was at the height of its popularity, Otomo didn’t want to succumb to the idea of noir for noir’s sake, i.e. the use of graphic violence as a mere tool to “shock.” The violence in Otomo’s manga was more subtle, because it was more honest. He eschewed unnecessary artifice. In April 1974, Otomo penned Boogie Woogie Waltz, his oldest story to have been included in a compilation (first in Good Weather, published in 1981, and then in its spiritual sequel–a compilation of the same name–the following year). Over the span of twenty-three pages, the manga relates the sentimental, sexual, and more generally existential wanderings of a young man working in a clothing shop, who falls in love with a prostitute and tries to rein in his death drives. Otomo made no attempt to turn his protagonist into an antihero: the young man in question simply endures his life, in an urban jungle, with no relief in sight. The narrative’s solidity is of little importance here. Instead, it is the tale’s flexibility that allows Otomo to portray a raw reality, one that is both trivial and yet often touching. Suka to Sukkiri aka Refreshment, published in August 1975, features the same type of “loser” who, unable to stand the oppressive heat of Tokyo, attempts to steal a fan, but fails miserably. He then tries to pilfer someone else’s, but the household he chooses doesn’t have one, so he subsequently ties up the inhabitants and then helps himself to the family’s… refrigerator! Otomo’s dark humor tends to shine through in aimless stories like these. Many of his tales combine both misery and ineptitude, saying much more about the human condition than tales with a “classic” structure. This seemingly sterile type of plot was a direct reflection of Otomo’s experience in the bars of Minami-Urawa. His characters’ appearance is much more telling than any lengthy dialogue could be: “After my experiences in those bars, I never looked at anyone in a superficial way again. As I observed people, both rich and poor, I started to think that everyone was trying their hardest, dealing with all sorts of terrible things. I was drawn to individuals like that, decided I liked people and all of their foibles. Once I started thinking this way, stories that fit into conventional patterns became too boring. I wanted to try drawing real people, people beyond the limits of anything I could possibly imagine.”

Shusei Sanchi no Yukie-san (July 1976) is one of the artist’s more disturbing stories, proving that, despite his young age, he didn’t consider any subject taboo. We see very young children–fascinated by what they are watching on TV–exploring their anatomy without really understanding the significance of their actions. Okasu, which appeared the following month, dealt with rape, and the line between dark humor and the truly sinister was even more blurred. In this twenty-five-page tale (this was typically the length of Otomo’s manga), a small, puny worker decides to rape a high school girl, but she ultimately gains the upper hand and beats him up. Otomo was only in his early twenties when he began addressing explosive themes, but we should remember that the manga artist was also being influenced by equally subversive directors, such as Sam Peckinpah, who depicted the rape of his hero’s wife in Straw Dogs for several long minutes: a scene that caused a great deal of controversy when it came out, especially because the victim ended up enjoying herself.

Otomo’s productivity was increasing year after year: a sign that Manga Action had growing confidence in him and that there was an audience for his work. The manga artist’s brutally realistic, and sometimes wacky, slices of life continued to grow in popularity, as is evidenced by Uchu Patrol Sigma aka Space Patrolman Shigema, published in February 1977. In this work, friends–who are spending an evening drinking together–each reveal that they come from different planets, the last one confessing that he is a “space sheriff” whose laser gun resembles a penis. Three months later, Otomo penned Nothing Will Be As It Was, which once again combined the absurd and the sordid. In it, he portrayed a young man’s panic while trying to dispose of the body of his friend, whom he has just killed (with a hammer) in his apartment. Nothing is spared, from the bleeding of the corpse to its dismemberment, and the protagonist finally decides to store the body parts in his refrigerator for future consumption. Like much of Otomo’s manga, the story never becomes too serious, but what is most impressive is his mastery of rhythm. The first pages linger on the quivering protagonist’s panic, his awkwardness, and the lost, ultimately desperate look in his eyes. Several panels have no text, and Otomo even cuts to a succession of gestures leading to the lighting of a cigarette, before the murderer deigns to open his mouth (and we begin to understand what may have motivated his act). The narrative has no conclusion as such: we simply see the murderer resign himself to sticking his victim’s body parts in the refrigerator. There’s no investigation or further follow-up.

The year 1977 marked an important turning point in Otomo’s career, as this was the year he first tackled a relatively lengthy story. The five installments of Sayonara Nippon were published in Manga Action (between August 1977 and February 1978) and relate the misadventures of a penniless young Japanese karate practitioner trying to earn a living in New York City by teaching his discipline (a story that was probably inspired, at least in part, by Otomo’s honeymoon in New York–incidentally, he also profited from his honeymoon to attend a Bob Marley concert). Culture shock then hits our protagonist, both hard and literally, when a former (six-and-a-half-foot-tall) boxer challenges–and easily pulverizes–him, and again, when he defends a young woman without realizing that he’s taking on a gang… The young karate practitioner’s candor makes him the ultimate loser, a clueless good guy who, like so many others, is just trying to get by with his limited understanding of life. Sayonara Nippon also embodies a certain aspect of Otomo’s art, one that many recognized as revolutionary at the time. In it, he highlighted the ethnicity of his characters, especially the Japanese, something that was extremely rare in the 1970s. Okasu’s title page, which shows a close-up of his young heroine’s face, is particularly telling. She has slanted eyes and a low nose, far from the manga standards of the time. Seen from a distance, you could mistake the drawing for a photograph. Nevertheless, Otomo wasn’t going for absolute realism in his subject matter (or even his characters’ appearance): “I’ve always paid attention to two key aspects: fantasy and realism. If you neglect one for the other, it weakens the story. Depicting things too realistically actually damages the work’s social realism, while delving too far into the realm of fantasy sabotages the imaginative aspect. I’m always thinking about how to balance the two. I think the realism of my early works stems from the fact that I used close friends as character models. My style naturally relies on observation.”

In 1978, Otomo also began to work on a series of (loose) adaptations of children’s stories and other literary classics, which were compiled in the volume Hansel and Gretel (published in 1981). The artist’s work thus began to appear in more and more magazines, including Young Action, Rocking’On, Pop Corn, and even Vampirella. Otomo explained this fragmented dissemination in 1979: “Hansel and Gretel was a long time in the making. I worked on it between jobs, without a clue as to where I’d publish it. No one at (Manga) Action was interested in hearing about Hansel and Gretel. Nor did anyone comment much when I showed it to them. […] Hansel and Gretel was entirely the result of my own personal desire to draw.” Inspired by the Dutch painter Bruegel’s creatures and backgrounds, Otomo thus created one of his lesser-known works on the sly, a work that is still of considerable artistic value today.7 The impressive precision of each drawing confirmed Otomo’s love of details, which was about to be recognized by a wider public thanks to his future successes. And among these successes was Fireball.

In early 1979, Otomo penned his very first science fiction work, Fireball,8 published in Action Deluxe magazine. He explained that this change of register was, once again, a personal choice: “I have guilty memories of telling [my editors] that I only wanted to do sci-fi. This was the era of children’s comics, ones like Dousei Jidai and Jukyoden, and I wanted to do something different. I persuaded my editor to let me write a hardcore sci-fi story, and this title was the result. […] Until then, I’d been depicting real everyday people, and I started to feel like my narratives were becoming too similar. I guess I just got tired of what I was doing. I wasn’t looking to develop a particular style. I just wanted to keep on doing new things, avoid falling into a rut.” At the time, the sci-fi genre was booming, both in the West with the Star Wars phenomenon, and in Japan with the revival brought on by Space Battleship Yamato, Galaxy Express 999, and Mobile Suit Gundam. Otomo has even admitted to being influenced by Star Wars. Could it have been the telekinetic powers of the Force that appealed to him? Fireball is about fifty pages long. Although the story remains unfinished and fizzles out a bit at the end, the influence of this first attempt was unparalleled both with respect to the public and Otomo himself. One could already see the beginnings of Akira in Fireball, so close are their codes and themes.

Fireball takes place in a megalopolis shaken by massive anti-government demonstrations. Those in power are secretly working on the development of a supercomputer called ATOM (a reference to Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy, known in Japan by its original name Mighty Atom), which should eventually give them absolute control of the city. The story follows two brothers, on opposite sides: the younger brother is a revolutionary who has found out about ATOM and seeks to destroy it, while the older brother is a member of the police force. Both have developed their telekinetic powers since childhood, especially the older one, whose skills are of interest to the computer. Under the guise of a medical examination, the older brother is anesthetized and subsequently dismembered. And, although this is never entirely made clear, this is because ATOM is looking to turn his body into a flesh and blood host. Things go from bad to worse when the police shoot the younger brother, riddling him with bullets. This causes the older brother’s sleeping consciousness (still on the operating table) to react. Having reached a higher level of consciousness, he regains control of his body, which is still in pieces, and generates heat waves powerful enough to destroy everything around him for miles, before going to confront the ATOM central unit. The last image shows the two brothers, the younger one having been “resurrected” by the resonance of their brain waves, floating above the exploding government installations.

Years later, in his first anthology, Otomo clarified what he had intended to do with Fireball: “Originally, it was supposed to be a much simpler story about a group of freedom fighters out to destroy the Director’s evil computer, but it morphed into a tale about psychic superpowers. I didn’t come up with the name Fireball until after the work was finished. The ending was going to be a battle between the heat of the psychic superhuman and the cold of the computer whilst the temperature rose around them, and then the computer would end up analyzing the secret of the psychic’s power and turn it against him, whereupon the younger brother, who claimed he didn’t have the power, would manifest it after all. That’s the original script I wrote, but it was too obscure. So, I decided to redraw the scene, with the characters combining their powers to overcome the computer, and the last scene is one in which the two heroes, looking down on the Earth from outer space, talk over old times.”

A society on the verge of implosion, an all-powerful government, a mad experiment that turns against its creators, and telekinetic powers: all of Fireball’s premises could just as easily be used to describe Akira