Almost as interesting as the manga itself is Akira‘s Western audience adventure. The anime movie was a worldwide hit in 1988 and sparked never before seen demand for the source material outside Japan.
Marvel Comics, through its Epic Comics imprint, recognized this opportunity and took a massive gamble. Beginning in 1989, they launched an ambitious localization project that would ultimately run until 1995, producing 38 individual comic book issues. What made this adaptation truly revolutionary wasn’t just the translation—it was the decision to fully colorize the black and white artwork.
Colorist Steve Oliff and his Olyoptics studio pioneered the use of computer coloring for this project, making Akira one of the first manga to receive this treatment. Initially, Oliff would send color samples to Otomo for approval, but the Japanese creator was so impressed with the work that he eventually gave Oliff creative freedom to continue without oversight. The vibrant palette they developed for Neo-Tokyo—all those glowing neons against industrial grays and deep shadows—has become inseparable from how many Western readers visualize the world of Akira.
The Epic Comics version made other concessions to Western comic book readers as well. The pages were flipped to read left-to-right (the Western standard), and the sound effects were translated and redrawn. Speech bubbles were reshaped to accommodate the horizontal flow of English text rather than the vertical orientation of Japanese writing.
These individual issues weren’t cheap—averaging around $4.80 per issue in the early 1990s—and collecting all 38 would have cost readers over $180. Today, these original colorized issues are highly valuable for collectors, with prices ranging from $8 to well over $100 per issue depending on condition and significance.
Epic also began releasing a more consolidated version in larger prestige format volumes, eventually producing 10 volumes between 1990 and 1993. Unfortunately, this collection was never completed—only covering the equivalent of the first 31 issues—leaving readers without the conclusion to the story. The pricing of these volumes tells its own story of the publication’s struggles: starting at $14.95, then increasing to $16.95, and finally $17.95, suggesting diminishing returns that likely contributed to the series’ premature end.
