What editions of the Akira manga are there?

One manga, four lives: black-and-white, color, hardcover, and back to the magazine pages.

Akira has been published in more forms than almost any manga of its era, and the forms argue with each other. The Japanese original is black-and-white and oversized. The first English edition was flipped and colored. The standard English edition went back to black-and-white. The anniversary edition went back to the Japanese art itself. And the newest Japanese edition goes back past the books to the magazine pages.

This page is the map. Each life of the book gets its own shelf below, with the dates and the physical facts that let you tell them apart in the wild.

Akira volume 3 English cover (Kodansha Comics) — **ONE OF MANY EDITIONS**The Kodansha Comics volume 3: one stop on a shelf that runs from the KC Deluxe volumes to the 35th Anniversary box set.

THE JAPANESE ORIGINAL

Kodansha · KC Deluxe · 1984 to 1993

Six B5 volumes

Young Magazine KC / KC Deluxe, printed at the magazine’s own B5 size with dyed page edges, 1984 to 1993. Volume 1’s cover prints a “SPECIAL PRICE” of ¥1,000 (about $6); the set stayed in print for decades, and volume 1 reached a 100th printing in 2020.

The painted openings

The original volumes carry Otomo’s painted color pages at the start of each book, a feature the English black-and-white editions kept only minimally, in the same positions.

THE COLOR LIFE

Made for America, then brought home

Epic Comics, 1988 to 1995

Marvel’s Epic imprint published Akira flipped to read left-to-right and colored by Steve Oliff’s Olyoptics, in 38 issues. It was the first English Akira, and the Library gives it a page of its own.

Japan takes the color back, 2003 to 2004

Kodansha re-imported the color version as the “All-Color International Edition” in twelve volumes and then as Sōtennenshoku Akira (“full natural color”) in six B5 volumes, 2003 to 2004, supervised by Otomo with the coloring re-adjusted, Japanese dialogue restored, and the English sound effects left standing as part of the design. Volume 1 was priced at ¥3,800 (about $24), and the set shipped in clear plastic cases.

THE ENGLISH BLACK-AND-WHITE LINE

Dark Horse, then Kodansha USA

Dark Horse, 2000 to 2002

Six paperback volumes in the original black-and-white and the original six-book shape, with a revised translation. For most English readers of the 2000s, this was simply Akira.

Kodansha USA, 2009 to 2011

When the rights came home to Kodansha’s American arm, its re-release was largely identical to the Dark Horse edition. Same books, new colophon: check the publisher’s name, not the contents, to tell them apart.

THE HARDCOVER

The anniversary edition

The 35th Anniversary Box Set

Kodansha Comics · October 31, 2017

Akira volume 1 Japanese cover, Kodansha, 1984 — **The art the set restores**The box set’s hardcovers present the manga with its original Japanese art unflipped for the first time in English. This is the 1984 first volume whose cover the set’s design honors.

Six hardcover volumes plus a hardcover Akira Club and an exclusive patch of the iconic pill design: 2,532 pages, list price $219.99, ISBN 9781632364616. It was the first English edition printed right-to-left, with Otomo’s hand-drawn Japanese sound effects kept and translated in endnotes. The set won two Eisner Awards in 2018, for Best Archival Collection and Best Publication Design, and its hardcovers were later sold individually as the Akira Hardcover Collection.

BACK TO THE MAGAZINE

Otomo The Complete Works · 2022 onward

A numbered life’s work

Kodansha’s Otomo The Complete Works, launched January 21, 2022, publishes Otomo’s career in numbered volumes, manga beside film production books such as the Akira storyboards. Its volumes are slightly smaller than the old tankobon and printed on far better paper.

The serialized Akira, restored

The Complete Works edition of the manga, begun in August 2024, aims to return to the original serialized version as far as possible, restoring title pages the books deleted and undoing the changes Otomo made for the collections. What those changes were is the subject of the Library’s revisions page.

Why was Akira colored? → The Manga Gallery → More from the Library →