Crossing the Threshold: The Tone Shift and Hard-R Pivot in Akira Volume 4

I am probably 80 to 100 pages into Akira, volume four, and right from the jump, I noticed a distinct change between volumes one through three and volume four. The change is that there’s cursing and nudity that was not in the previous volumes.

I tried to go online and see if there was any particular reason for this shift. What’s odd is that I can definitely find articles, posts, and reviews of Akira as a whole where people notice the shift from volumes one through three versus volumes four through six, but no one can say what the exact cause was. Some people speculate that maybe it was just because of the level of success the series was having as it was being published in Japan, and they realized they had a lot more freedom to do whatever they wanted to do content-wise.

To be clear, the nudity and sexual elements don’t mean it turned into a hentai comic. It’s more that the first three volumes felt more PG-13—there was definitely violence, but volume four moves from PG-13 into a hard R. Not that there’s explicit sex or anything like that, and not that I personally have a problem with that content. My introduction to adult comics came when I got my parents to get me a subscription to Heavy Metal magazine when I was like 12 or 13. I showed them the first couple of pages, said it was a comic magazine, and asked for a subscription; they didn’t look further into it. So I know European comics are much more liberal in terms of sexual content, and I’m not saying Akira is on that level or that it should have remained in the PG-13 realm. It’s just that I noticed a clear shift, and I wonder what caused it.

Usually, when something is aimed at a certain audience level, it stays there. Harry Potter grew, got mature, and got darker as the audience grew with it, and the books became more complex as the characters got older. I would say Akira‘s jump was noticeable in that same way. It’s not out of character or unreasonable, just very distinct.

Pacing, Time Compression, and Post-Apocalyptic Realities

Anyway, I’m still enjoying it. It’s very much a book that is amped up in these later volumes. The first two or three volumes really do feel like what I had been told before reading the series—that the anime movie really only covers the first half of the manga. With minor detail changes, that’s a fairly accurate statement. But now, in volume four, it feels like a whole new post-apocalyptic ball game. I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes.

Another thing I noticed is the compression of time to move scenes and plot points along. Volumes one through three (and manga in general) are known for moment-to-moment pacing where you really linger on conversations and gestures. A two-minute or five-minute fight might take 40 or 50 pages. They space things out and give all those moments time to breathe, doing a lot of storytelling based on significance rather than chronological time. But in these later chapters, there are places where things that previously would have taken 5 or 10 pages move through in just a single page or a couple of panels because they’ve got to keep moving.

I’ll be interested to see if they cover some of this in the bonus material that came in the box set, called the Akira Club. I haven’t read any interviews with Otomo where he discusses it, but it may be that in the beginning he had a vaguer sense of the story beats. He may have been making it up as he went along a bit in the early chapters, whereas once he reached the halfway point, he had enough time to think it through and said, “All right, now that I know what I want to get to, I’m not going to wander and linger. We’ve got business to attend to—let’s move the story along.” This is all conjecture, of course.

A Essential Text for Comic Creators

I still constantly come across panels that visually amaze me, and story beats that are fantastic in how they describe these moments. I’m honestly starting to think that anyone who aspires to create comics or sequential visual storytelling kind of has to read this book.

If I had read it back when it was being published by Epic Comics in the late ‘80s, or just earlier in my career, I feel like it would have deeply shaped my sense of how stories should be told. I can see how it shaped the work of creators I was reading in the ‘90s and 2000s, and all the time afterward. So many creators’ work has been shaped by this, and I would gladly have let my mind and storytelling sense be shaped by it earlier, too. I kind of wish I had read the whole series sooner, but I’m enjoying the hell out of it now.

Have you noticed the sharp tonal shift and hard-R jump in volume four of Akira? Do you think it was a result of Otomo having more creative freedom after the series became a massive hit, or a natural reflection of Neo-Tokyo collapsing into total post-apocalyptic chaos?

How do you feel about the sudden compression of pacing in the second half of the series compared to the slow-burn, moment-to-moment decompression of the first three volumes?

Is there a classic comic or manga series that you read later in life that made you think, “I wish I had read this years ago because it would have completely changed how I make art”?