What are Akira Club and Kaba?
The manga has a paper trail, and Otomo published it himself.
Most manga leave their production behind in the magazine office. Akira’s was bound and sold. Akira Club, released by Kodansha on June 9, 1995, is the official archive of the series’ making: the test designs for the paperback covers, the chapters’ title pages as they appeared in Young Magazine, the merchandise, and Otomo’s own commentary throughout.
And around the manga stand the two great illustration collections. Kaba (1989) gathers Otomo’s illustration work of 1971 to 1989 at the height of Akira’s fame; Kaba 2 (2012) takes the story from 1990 onward. Together they are the nearest thing to a museum of Otomo on paper.
AKIRA CLUB
Kodansha · June 9, 1995What is inside
Cover test designs that show the famous covers being decided; the magazine title pages the collected volumes left behind; photographs and listings of the era’s merchandise; and commentary by Otomo on his own work, the source half the world’s Akira scholarship quietly stands on.
Its English life
Dark Horse collaborated with Kodansha on an English edition in 2007. In 2017 the book returned as a hardcover inside the 35th Anniversary Box Set, which is now the easiest way to own it in English.
KABA AND KABA 2
The illustration collections · 1989 and 2012Kaba (1989)
OTOMO KATSUHIRO ARTWORK KABA, Kodansha, September 1, 1989. A square, LP-sleeve-sized hardcover of some 28.5 cm, bilingual in Japanese and English, carrying over 200 illustrations from 1971 to 1989 (ISBN 4-06-305004-1). Marvel distributed it in the United States on release. The title, by the oft-told account, is the Japanese word for hippopotamus, chosen after a nature program caught Otomo’s eye.
What Kaba shows that Akira cannot
The commercial artist: novel covers, Canon, Suntory and Honda advertisements, the eye-catch illustrations for NHK’s talk show YOU, and the short story Farewell to Weapons printed twice, once in the Epic color version and once in its original black-and-white beside photographs of the model kits made from it.
Kaba 2 (2012)
Published by Kodansha on February 1, 2012, Kaba 2 resumes where the first volume stopped, covering the work of 1990 to 2011: the film director’s decades, documented in the same format.
The production books
The archive instinct continues in Otomo The Complete Works, whose numbered volumes place the film’s paper beside the manga’s: Animation Akira Storyboards 1 and 2 in 2022, layout and key-frame collections after them.