I went into this manga with no knowledge of the anime or story line, so initially I thought the whole book would be about Kaneda and his gang engaging in delinquent-ass activities. The story that unfolded was much bigger than that, including psychic children, the destruction of the city (twice), military intervention, and warfare between the two surviving cults in a post-apocalyptic landscape.

The characters are kind of hard to like at the beginning of the story. Kaneda is an orphan and the leader of a Bōsōzoku gang who frequently engage in fights with rival gangs, most notably the clowns. Being the leader, Kaneda also gets the most badass and technologically-advanced bike -- an electronic racer he stole from a sponsored rider. He is 15, has no parents and lives in a cyberpunk dystopia, so his morals are a little bit shaky. For example, he gets the school nurse pregnant and could care less, only using her to get free drugs for his gang. But regardless of his morals, I will admit he is pretty badass.

Tetsuo is an orphan just like Kaneda, but unlike him Tetsuo is not confident in his abilities and possesses an inferiority complex, possibly stemming from his absolutely abysmal hairline. He just wants to prove himself and be a badass like Kaneda,so he decides to take the lead during a motorcycle race but runs into one of the psychic children I mentioned earlier. The army retrieves their esper along with Tetsuo who is injured but miraculously alive. They decide that if Tetsuo could survive the explosive crash, he must be a psychic too. Tetsuo's power is realized and he doesn't know how to act. All his life he's been a beta and now he has godlike powers. He goes mad, killing his friend and taking control of the clown gang to get drugs.

Some real fucked up shit takes place in the latter chapters. Tetsuo starts a cult based around Akira (the child who destroyed the city multiple times) and creates an army to fight Lady Miyako, the leader of another cult. Tetsuo drugs and rapes like 3 girls at once and 2 of them end up dying. The lone survivor, Kaori, becomes his slave and is fiercely loyal to him.


The art in this book is absolutely phenomenal. I love it so much. The cityscapes in particular are amazingly drawn. The city itself almost becomes its own character which makes the impact of its destruction so much bigger. Otomo spent so much time and put so much detail into the crafting of Neo-Tokyo, only to destroy it and introduce us to Neo-Neo-Tokyo.


I absolutely adore the artwork but the rest of the manga has some flaws. The dialogue can be shitty at times, the characters can be flat, some parts of the story are too drawn out, but overall I very much enjoyed the 2000+ pages of this manga and plan to read it again.