It’s the last day of June and I was going to write a whiny, reflective, introspective, wankertabulous post about being stuck in publishing and employment limbo, and how after six months of living in my bedroom I seem to have become unintentionally grafted to my bedsheets, but who wants to read about that? (I certainly don’t want to write about it when I already complain about everything ad nauseam to any poor soul foolish enough to stumble across the maw of my lair). So instead I’m going to talk about consumption. And I’m not referring to the type of consumption that allows opera divas to belt out their final arias while supposedly in their death throes. I’m talking about fan consumption, i.e. reading til dawn or until your lightbulb conks out, DVD marathons that make your eyes bleed in joy and gaming sessions that will no doubt become the cause of your permanent RSI in years to come. Aw. But ever since having rediscovered THE LIBRARY and it’s most admirable feature and everybody’s favourite four letter word beginning with “F” (nymphomaniacs have another one), I’ve cast away any pretences towards scholarship and literary blah and started reading again. OK, so maybe it’s manga I’m reading as opposed to great slabs of indented text, but there’s no such distinction in a post-post-modern world (I may need another “post” in there, please advise).

I was in Grade 6 when Mum took me to see Katsuhiro Otomo’s Metropolis (2001) at the Westgarth. It was is a fantastic film, with a stylish blend of CGI and traditional animation telling an exciting and at times, rollicking, story adapted from Osamu Tezuka’s own take on Fritz Lang’s original silent film by the same name. I’ve since seen as much of Lang’s Metropolis that has survived, and I was blown away by how iconic and beautifully-rendered it is, despite an admittedly corny moral underpinning the plot. But Otomo’s Metropolis is dark and ambiguous, and somehow manages to be incredibly satisfying despite its “unhappy” ending. As far as I’m concerned it’s adaptation at its finest.

Unfortunately I didn’t feel the same way towards one of Otomo’s earlier films based on his graphic novel masterwork, Akira. Maybe I was too young, but Akira the movie left me cold, and I found it ultimately more confusing than rewarding. But having recently (and finally) enjoyed Neon Genesis Evangelion as a manga after struggling to understand what people saw in its anime version, I decided to try Akira in its original graphic novel form when I saw the first volume at the library.

“It’s epic”, said my uncle when I told him I was reading it, and he couldn’t be more right. Set in an imagined Tokyo of 2030 but indelibly imbued with a 1980s Modernist art style, Akira is a massive story on a massive scale (it reportedly took more than 10 years for Otomo to complete all six volumes). The story itself is a classic example of “ordinary” kids getting involved in government conspiracy with global (and interplanetary) repurcussions, after scientific experiments to bring out psychic abilities in children caused the destruction of Tokyo, and then the destruction of Neo-Tokyo and the beginning of international yet very internal conflict as all sides seek to survive against a society gone haywire and its self-appointed and deadly supernatural overlords. And like all good stories, its characters are multi-dimensional and the readers’ attitudes towards people once perceived as enemies shift as circumstances throw them into a different light. You don’t know who you should be supporting because, like life, it’s never that clearly cut.

My one major complaint about Akira though is that it’s sometimes too action-packed, too ceaseless in its destruction of buildings and people as to make it unbelievable that by the end so many of the protagonists survived. Breaks in momentum are scarce, there’re always things happening on all sides of the conflict, and after finishing a volume, I’d feel exhausted. I had a similar sense of being overstimulated after seeing a more recent movie of Otomo’s, Steamboy. Still, I suppose when the destruction of the world is imminent you’re not going to be doing much sleeping.

Image credits: Metropolis and Akira