The 'Akira' manga continues to escalate with this fifth volume. The fourth may have been the best yet, but this tops it and leaves us right on the brink of everything. That suggests that the sixth will wrap things up with serious impact. It's 'Kei II' and we can see why now. Kei isn't a power like these numbers, but she has a power nonetheless and once enough of the pieces on this post-apocalyptic chessboard are rearranged appropriately, that power can be used to end all this.

There are a lot of those pieces now, because they keep on growing in number but rarely losing an important character. In fact, we start out with a stack of new ones, because the outlaw scholars of the world are brought to the American aircraft carrier waiting outside Tokyo Bay. Dr. Dubrovsky is the last of them and he's Soviet, a firm reminder of how old this manga is, but he joins Drs. Jorris and Simmons, George Hock, Prof. Bernardi and Karma Tangi, who's a Tibetan lama. They're going to adopt the name of Juvenile A for the project, sharing data, trying to figure out three incidents and monitoring for further change.

If the American ship is the base for one faction in this volume, run by a stupid admiral and with an optimistic special forces team flying in and then out to the wreckage of Neo-Tokyo to join the spy, Lt. George Yamada, in an attempt to assassinate Akira, then we have a few others. Of course, the Great Tokyo Empire is a second, with Akira, quiet as ever, in charge, the jackass lieutenant stirring the pot every chance he gets and Tetsuo doing the outrageous stuff;p which is on a whole new level this time out. He takes a serious chunk out of the Moon, for Pete's sake, effectively turning it into a Death Star with a ring. He's actually calm for much of this book, but by the end of it, his power is so vast that it physically corrupts him to an astounding degree.

Kaneda returned at the end of volume four, simply falling out of the sky with so much more from the Neo-Tokyo before the previous incident. He's quickly reunited with Kei and Kai. The seriously injured colonel shows up too with an unconscious Kiyoko in his arms. There's Lady Miyako to take her off his hands and start her on the road to recovery. However, this faction breaks and reforms a number of times as characters leave for this or that, deal with the ramifications and return for the next stage in this journey. Kaneda gets to deal with being on the same side as Joker too, the enemy biker leader he fought with in earlier volumes.

There's a lot going down in this one, but it's relatively easy to summarise because it unfolds in an impeccably visual manner. Much of it is devastation, with an 8.5 earthquake underneath the city prompting skyscrapers to topple and a tsunami to rage over the American ship. Tetsuo's ravaging of the moon prompts an immense storm that floods much of the city. As you might imagine, there are some wonderful panels of scale, but the best ones in this volume aren't huge, the double page images kept to a minimum and mostly used for other purposes. Instead, they're regular and small but so deep that we fall into them.

Tetsuo is much of the rest too. There's a wonderful scene when he simply walks onto the American ship, taking out a launching jet fighter in the process, then through it to chat with the Juvenile A team before walking back out again. They file the appropriate report and the idiot admiral can't believe a word of it. Surely they must be imagining things! That's the mindset that prompted the special forces team to attempt to kill off Akira. I'm open to what they can do but it's not going too well thus far. Much of the finalé is Tetsuo losing control and rampaging gloriously.

There are other fights too. Kei and the Colonel reach Chiyoko in the control building for SOL with Kaneda and Kai on their heels. A group from the Great Tokyo Empire attempt to take them down and that's a fun battle to watch, not least because it includes a giant. My favourite panel, though, goes back to Tetsuo and it's surprisingly one in which he's not causing any damage. He just has, of course, and he'll do more, but at this point he's just standing on the deck of the aircraft carrier as a fighter jet zooms past him. That freeze frame is an absolute joy to look at.

With everything to play for, I'm happy that volume five is the last book that I'll read and review in October because the first book that I'll read for September will be volume six, the grand finalé to this epic story. I'll dive into that tomorrow, but you'll have to wait a whole month for my review. I apologise for that but not with much substance to back it up. It's got to the point where I have no wish to put these books down. No wonder that 'Akira' was such a huge hit at the time and an even bigger influence on what would follow! ~~ Hal C F Astell

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