AKIRA (Marvel Epic) #6, p.57 / Vol. 1 p. 355 by Oliff & Otomo (feat. Kaneda, Kei & Tetsuo)

When I first moved to Japan in 1990, people were somewhat amazed that I was aware of Katsuhiro Otomo and his work. I would tell them that American fans generally talked about manga and Japanese anime in two distinct terms Before Akira and After Akira. At that time, it was THE single work to which virtually every other manga or anime was compared.

One of the reasons that American fans such as myself were familiar with the manga is that, with the success of his movie version, Otomo-san, via Marvel Comics creator-owner imprint, Epic Comics, published an English version of the comic beginning in 1989. While manga is now ubiquitous in America, back then, few manga works had been translated in their entirety in my home country, so, before Marvel would publish it, they wanted to make two major changes to the original Japanese format. The first thing they wanted to do was flip the art so that it read from left to right instead of right to left (which, if you don't know, is the way manga is published in Japan). The second thing they wanted to do was color it.

A few years before this, in the 1980's when I was still in university, I first became aware of Katsuhiro Otomo's work when my college buddy, Tom, found a non-translated (bootleg?) tape of the animated movie, "Harmagedon" on which Otomo was the writer and art designer. (He also had tapes of "Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind,""Macross;" and a few others.) Even though we couldn’t understand everything, compared to most American animation, it was pretty mind-blowing.

Unbeknownst to us (or, at least to me) at the time, Otomo-san had been serializing the Akira manga in Japan since 1982. The animated movie version, which shortened the plot of the manga considerably, came out in 1988. However, even before the movie came out in Japan, the two of us saw a short preview of it at a big comic book and science fiction convention(I think it was in Atlanta). This was the first time either of us had heard of it and, just based on that short sneak peek, we agreed that neither of us had seen animation like it before.

Back at Marvel, because the original art was drawn for a black-and-white medium, coloring it, especially with 1980’s technology, could have proven tricky. The ace in the hole in this situation was veteran colorist, Steve Oliff.

After Otomo looked at some color samples, he personally chose Oliff for the job. Then, to make sure it was done right, Otomo and his family visited the colorist in California to work out the look of the American production. Later, back in Japan, Otomo's studio printed the guides on a high quality heavy-stock artist's paper that allowed Mr. Oliff, to use virtually any medium he wanted (air brush, colored pencils, markers and whatever else he thought necessary) when he painted the pages. When he finished one of the issues, he would send the colored guides back to Japan for Otomo’s approval, but after a while, Otomo-san told Mr. Oliff that he trusted his artistic judgment and that he no longer needed his approval before publication.

The color guide I acquired is from issue six of the Marvel run (the scan kindly was provided by Terry Holtz), which corresponds to page 355 in my Dark Horse edition of the collected first volume (although it is marked as p. 353 on the guide itself). It shows the three main characters: Tetsuo, a boy whose latent esper powers have been awakened, making his mind unstable; Kaneda, his childhood friend and a member of a motorcycle gang to which they both belong, and Kei, a member of an anti-government terrorist organization with whom Kaneda has become involved.

Now, as many who have one of these will tell you, these color guides are the closest thing you'll get to original art from this series since Otomo does not sell his published works. If you need proof of this, look up the story of Otomo's special exhibition in Tokyo where he displayed the more than 2000 pieces of OA that made up the entirety of his Akira run. However, a few years before that, this fact did not stop a foreigner living in Japan from trying to "auction" forged Otomo pages to some unsuspecting Western collectors.

The con artist used a cover story that claimed Otomo was selling selected pages from Akira to raise money for victims of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that struck the east coast of the main Japanese island, Honshu. If it were true, I thought it odd that I could find no Japanese articles that verified this alleged generosity, so a Japanese friend of mine and I did some amateur investigative journalism and cobbled together information that we published on a website devoted to comics and pop culture that definitively proved those pieces he was selling were fake and shut down that operation. You're welcome.