I've been a long-time fan of Katsuhiro Otomo's AKIRA - that legendary 1988 animated movie which helped introduce the very idea of anime to the United States and the rest of the world as a viable, adult art form.
My first encounters with Akira had been in animation reviews ( I was then a young, aspiring animation student), where praise upon lavish praise was heaped upon it. But try as I might, I could not secure a local copy anywhere (mind you, this was in the Paleozoic Era, when the internet and cell phones were just a nerd's wet dreams.) So when I went to the venerable HMV in Hong Kong and spied an Akira laserdisc (again, the Paleozoic), I immediately pounced upon it like a raptor on a Jurassic Park bit player. Despite the fact that the laserdisc contained no English subtitles and I spoke no Japanese, I was mesmerized by the story and the animation so much that I was an instant convert to the cult of Akira.
I would learn later on that Akira was originally a serialized manga (later compiled into six hardbound volumes), and like a heroin addict needing his next fix, I simply had to read the original source material. And once again, Hong Kong came to my rescue, where I espied the Akira manga in Page One. In my naiveté, I thought the thick, heavy volume contained the entire ouvré, but as I neared the halfway mark of the graphic novel, I realized that it was merely the first volume of an epic 6-volumes and 2182-pages. But Hong Kong's fabled bookstores could be of no help from this point, and further travels around Asia failed to yield any other volumes of Akira. And so it was that as mammals asserted their dominance and the years crawled into the Mesozoic, the many differences between the original graphic novel and the landmark animated film remained an elusive enigma.
Fast-forward to the Cenozoic - Present Day.
Despite the existence of the internet and PayPal and Amazon.com, it never occurred to me to purchase the entire 6-volume set off the tubes. Maybe because I went haywire with my credit cards in my youth and abused eBay like a red-headed stepchild, or maybe because I just don't like having my sensitive digits floating in the internet cloud. Not even a trip to Tokyo reminded me to resume my quest for the remaining 5 volumes of Akira.
However, as Maleficent so eloquently remarked in Sleeping Beauty: "But see the gracious whim of fate!" Running a couple of errands this morning, I was absent-mindedly browsing through the art and photography sections of NBS, before I sauntered off into the comics section. I haven't read comics since X-Men:101, being merely content to skim websites for updates on the interminable reboots and byzantine story arcs of my favorite characters. Anyway, I looked up from a copy of Blackest Night, and, as SJP says in the video below:
Some six thousand pesos and a Laking National card application later, the
I'm so stoked I could just reduce Neo-Tokyo to a smouldering pile of rubble again.
And à-propos of nothing, as we see SJP being whisked away - hopefully to the guillotine - we shall resume La Série Gay Paree next time.
.
.
.
.
.
.
"I had to have it!"
