Having watched (and quite enjoyed) the original Akira movie, I ordered in the collection of Akira graphic novels to my local library to compare the two works. Instead of the original series, I received this book; an adaptation of the movie "Akira", turned into a graphic novel.

I don't think that adapting books from movies is really necessary, but, if I ever had to do such a thing, I would do it exactly how it is done here. Stills from the movie have been taken, text bubbles added, and all of this has been stitched together into a graphic novel. The stills have also been collaged together into a variety of interesting ways. Panels have been sewed together to show objects that did not appear as a single panel in the movie, for example, and the layout is interesting, too. It breaks away from the traditional presentation of a graphic novel, and does makes for quite an interesting read.

But the plot of the book itself - against a background of civil unrest in Neo-Tokyo, twenty years after the end of World War III, Tetsuo, a teenager who is a member of a motorcycle gang in Neo Tokyo, has a accident with a mysterious escaped government test subject, and is taken away by military police for testing. It seems that the accident may have unlocked Tetsuo's innate psychic abilities, and he might be quite powerful indeed. During the test, the lead research scientist and the military general underseeing the test compare Tetsuo to the mysterious entity Akira, and the General orders the scientist to ensure that the subject does not get too powerful to be controlled. End of book one.

The movie adaptation is split into six books. Seriously. The book is about one hundred and fifty pages long, contains the first twenty or thirty minutes worth of the movie's storyline, and stops. There's a lot of foreshadowing of future events here, a promise of the action and excitement to come, but not yet delivered. It's not to say that this is a bad story, far from it, it is to say that you are reading one of six parts of a larger story, each part not fully able to be appreciated without the rest.

My other issue with the book, also not related to the plot itself, is the back-to-front, right-to-left panel layout of the book. Japan presents their manga in this manner, the exact opposite to what is done in English writing. Since the book is being translated to English, it would make sense to have the pages reversed so that it is presented in the order we are accustomed to in English-speaking countries. The book makes a quick disclaimer on the front cover (Japan's back cover) to tell the reader this, and to explain that this is to present the book "as originally presented", but it is quite hard to break out of the habit of reading a novel in front-to-back, left-to-right order. If I were reading a novel originally written in Japan, I would not expect the publisher to publish the book backwards.

Splitting a graphic novel adaptation of a movie into six parts was a silly idea (or perhaps not, since a collector would be forced to buy six books to have them all) and the panels should not be presented in backwards order in English-speaking countries, but otherwise, the presentation here is excellent. Novel adaptations of movies should be done like this. ( )