Katsuhiro Otomo, the author
Katsuhiro Otomo made his debut as a manga artist in 1973, at the age of 19. With Domu, he became the first manga author to win the Nihon SF Taisho Award (Japan's Grand Prize for Science Fiction). In 1982 he began serializing AKIRA, and in 1988 Otomo personally directed its adaptation into an animated film. From that point on, his work expanded into the audiovisual field as well. As an author who opened new avenues of expression in both manga and animation, in 2015 he received the Grand Prix of the Angoulême International Comics Festival — the first Asian author to do so.
Katsuhiro Otomo, manga artist
Otomo's manga is known for its meticulous, restrained linework, free of exaggeration. The expressions of his characters and the structure of his cities are drawn with the same weight as reality, and that draftsmanship had a texture unlike any manga before it.
The serialization of AKIRA began in 1982, in the pages of the then newly founded magazine Weekly Young Magazine. The story unfolds in Neo-Tokyo, a city rebuilt after a third world war. The military and anti-government forces move around a set of psychic powers, and through that maelstrom a group of young delinquents carves its way on motorcycles. In the Japan of the 1960s and 1970s, violent collective movements such as the student protests and the bōsōzoku biker gangs erupted across the country. The motorcycle in particular was, for the young people of that era, a symbol of rebellion and self-assertion. Though set in the future, AKIRA carries within it the shadow of the times Otomo lived through.
The serialization continued until 1990, producing a vast work of more than 2,000 pages. The density with which the ruined city is drawn, down to the last fragment of rubble, has scarcely any precedent within the format of a weekly publication. Anyone who came to AKIRA through the film will discover, upon opening these pages, that what they had seen was only a part of the story.
Katsuhiro Otomo, anime director
In 1988, while AKIRA was still being published, Otomo personally directed the adaptation of the work into an animated film. A budget of ten billion yen, 150,000 drawings, a team of 1,300 people: a scale that exceeded what was usual in the animated cinema of the time. The scene in which Kaneda's motorcycle skids to a halt is known as the "Akira slide" and is still referenced today in works all over the world. The film crossed borders, changed the notion that "animation is for children," and was one of the triggers behind the spread of the term "Japanimation." Otomo went on to make MEMORIES and Steamboy, pursuing the audiovisual as a second field of expression, on a par with manga.
Otomo - The Complete Works
Otomo - The Complete Works is the complete collection that gathers, volume by volume, the work of Katsuhiro Otomo. Alongside the manga works — from early short stories such as Gunshot through Domu and the manga version of AKIRA — it also includes the storyboards and layout books of the films AKIRA and Steamboy. The storyboard is the blueprint Otomo himself drew to define how each shot of a film would move, and it lets you trace the stage that comes before the finished image. That the manga original and the audiovisual blueprint should appear together in a single collection is, in itself, proof that Katsuhiro Otomo has traveled two forms of expression.
The Katsuhiro Otomo you don't yet know
Much of the world came to know Katsuhiro Otomo through the film AKIRA. But that film is a reconstruction of only a part of the original manga, which had not yet concluded at the time. Otomo - The Complete Works, published by Kodansha, is the complete collection that brings together, in the original Japanese edition, his work both as an artist and as an anime director. As a manga artist and as a director, in the books of this category there is a Katsuhiro Otomo whom a single film is not enough to encounter.