If Akira was the MacGuffin of the second volume of Katsuhiro Otomo's manga of the same name, then he's even more so here with the ongoing rivalry between Kaneda and Tetsuo (and the new rivalry between the various numbered experiments and Tetsuo) put firmly on the back burner. In fact, while Tetsuo was prominent at the very end of the second book which rolls him right into the very beginning of this third book, he's absent for the vast majority of it. He's there in the opening panels, his arm shot off by the space laser after freeing Akira from his confinement beneath the Olympic stadium, but we lose track of him after that and he doesn't return until the final panels.

Instead, Kaneda and Kei rescue Akira, who's been firmly identified as Number 28 in the hierarchy of the government's psychic experiments, and take him into Neo-Tokyo proper, which looks wildly different from before. That's because it's been evacuated after declaration of martial law, with a population now comprised of looters and robots there to stop them. These robots are designed to withstand even a nuclear blast, so the looters aren't going to take them down, and this makes for memorable scenes before the population is allowed to return home.

In the wake of emergency, which left three hundred and seventy dead, there's political chaos. The ever-imposing colonel tides it over, pretending that it was prompted by a mere system fault, but he eventually has to mount a coup to continue with his plans. That's the backdrop for much of the book, against which plays a search by pretty much everyone for the fugitive Akira, and each party seems to end up with him at some point. He's almost like the ball in a vicious pinball machine, one minute with these people, the next taken by someone else, bouncing from custody to custody, as he continues to fully awaken.

Of course, Kaneda and Kei constitute one group, along with the ever-memorable Chiyoko, but it's an odd group because they plan to take Akira to Nezu, the shadowy political leader who runs the underground organisation Kei and her brother Ryu have been working for. However, he's become a second group, who refuses to hand him over to a third, led by Lady Miyako, and even orders hits on his own people and anyone else who might know something. I'm not sure they count as another group but hey, why not? The more the merrier.

Lady Miyako has her own operatives, of course, children who possess special talents: Sakaki, Mozu and Miki, new characters to the story who quickly match older ones.  Talking of kids with talents, the Colonel has the three numbers we know from earlier volumes—Masaru, Kiyoko and Takashi— searching for Akira from inside a helicopter. And talking of Ryu, he's still in the fracas, separated from his sister but still active, also ignorant of Nezu's shift in allegiances.

As you can imagine this works wonderfully in a visual format like manga. Every faceoff is dramatic and involves plenty of action, especially after Kaneda acquires a tank. The addition of the robots helps too and the action ramps up to the point that we have to wonder when Akira is going to play a part himself. He's passive for the vast majority of the book but the trigger finally arrives and he reacts strongly to it, enough that the mass destruction that follows takes up fifteen pages, six of which are single panels across double page spreads. It's powerful stuff.

There's more story than the second volume, which isn't a shock in the slightest, given how skimpy the plot was last time out. However, there's more action too, which is a shock because it was that book's primary function. You could turn to a random page in this volume and find another crucial showdown between at least two groups in play and very probably more. Almost precisely halfway through the book, there's a Mexican standoff that isn't merely comprised of three people but of three groups of three people each. It's a threeway threeway standoff. Otomo is having fun.

Eventually, of course, we end with Akira, now fully awake and in possession of his full powers, and there's Tetsuo with him, after being absent for almost the entire book. Unlike the prior volume, he doesn't constitute one of the groups in this Akira hunt, but he ends up with him anyway and we roll into volume four almost as we rolled into volume three, just with a heck of a lot more impact to Neo-Tokyo, its population and its political structure. All bets are off, it seems, which makes it a surprise that the next two books be called 'Kei'. I'll see you next month for 'Kei I'. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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