On Tuesday, X (previously Twitter) was flooded with hints that Akira manga author Katsuhiro Otomo and his team were working on a new manga. He tweeted a picture of Kiyoko, the prophetic figure made by Otomo-sensei, alongside the caption “I had a dream Otomo-sensei drew a new manga.” The picture was accompanied by the tweet, “Kiyoko’s prophetic dream will become reality.”
Otomo announced his next long-form series, his first since Akira, back in 2012. The same year he announced that he would be working on the manga alone, without any help from anybody else, and that it would be set in the Meiji Era. Otomo has hinted that the manga’s intended demographic may be older than that of Weekly Shonen Sunday, the magazine where the manga was originally scheduled to launch that autumn.
Otomo revealed his secret manga project in an interview published in Shogakukan’s Big Comic magazine in 2018. He went on to say that he was at a loss for how to put pen to paper, but was enjoying the process anyway.
Otomo started out as a manga artist, and some of his first works include Domu, Kibun wa m Sensu, and the groundbreaking Akira. He subsequently moved out into animation with a full film version of his own Akira narrative and a segment in the Robot Carnival omnibus.
He also oversaw the production of the anime films Memories, Gundam: Mission to the Rise, and Steamboy. Harmagedon, Roujin Z, Spriggan, Metropolis, Freedom Project, and Hipira: The Little Vampire are just a few of the films he worked on with others.
