The epic, timeless hit that inspired the legendary anime film and made the word "manga" part of the global vocabulary returns in a new hardcover edition. The AKIRA Hardcover Collection features the original right-to-left manga reading format and Katsuhiro Otomo's original, hand-drawn sound effects in a beautiful, large-sized collectible edition.The  once glittering Neo-Tokyo lies in ruin, leveled in minutes by the  infinite power of the child psychic Akira. From the flooded wasteland of  rubble and anarchy rises the Great Tokyo Empire, populated by a ragtag  army of zealots and crazies who worship and fear Akira ad his mad prime  minister, Tetsuo, and angry teen with immense powers of his own—and  equally immense, twisted ambitions. The world at large is not taking the  threat lying down, and the military strength of the planet is massing  to take on the empire, but will technology's most advanced weaponry be  enough to destroy Akira? And are Tetsuo's rapidly growing paranormal  abilities a potentially greater threat?