The Akira Book: Katsuhiro Otomo: The Movie and the Manga

Never thought I could give a book a 1-star. I just didn’t believe something like that could really exist. But hey, it’s nice to be proven wrong... I guess?The AKIRA Book clearly never passed an editor, nor was it written by someone who writes books. As you open to page 1 and 2-3, you’ll notice the author is very liberal with parentheses. VERY liberal. You need not focus to see them. Because they’ve established an army. Most of these are used to express tangential thoughts unrelated to Otomo or AKIRA. There even comes a time when the ideas are so far out that he throws an additional parenthetical idea within a parenthetical idea.The title is very misleading as it is not entirely about AKIRA in either medium or Otomo. In true tangential form, this book covers many factoids about other creators, comics, animated and live film, etc., from all over the world in great detail.The actual first chapter on the AKIRA film is nothing but two pages of buzzwords -containing zero real info- followed by this I N T E N S E political rant comparing AKIRA to other films which is clearly very, very misguided.If this could be purchased for $5 somewhere I’d buy it. It’s nice to have clear-cut examples of how not to do things. But the full price is a damn sin.