5/13/2023 0 Comments Akira, Vol. 1 by Katsuhiro OtomoThat ignores some huge titles, like ‘Love and Rockets’ and ‘Maus’ and ‘Raw’ and ‘Weirdo’ and ‘Yummy Fur’ and ‘The Incal’ and ‘Les Cites Obscures’, etc… but I’ll stand by it, with all due respect. If it was a decision between: Katsuhiro Otomo, ‘Domu’ and ‘Akira’ Frank Miller, ‘Batman: Year One’ and ‘Batman: The Dark Knight Returns’ or Alan Moore, ‘V for Vendetta’ and ‘Watchmen’ I’d say that Otomo created the best and most influential works of the 1980’s. The importance of ‘Akira’ is difficult to express, but it certainly rivals US contemporaries ‘Watchmen’ and ‘The Dark Knight Returns’, and it ran far longer than either title, giving it an epic scope and grandeur that exceeds both of those seminal works. The top Goodreads review of Katsuhiro Otomo’s epochal cyberpunk manga Akira puts the work in precisely that context: Everyone now is either trying to overthrow it or recapture it or some incoherent combination of both, but we are all oriented toward it.Ĭomics has a privileged relation to the 1980s as well: traditional historicization aside, it is comics’s true golden age. The length and breadth of our politics, our pop culture, even our high culture, were laid down in that decade. The 1980s-the latest, the last golden age.
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