Katsuhiro Otomo
Kasuhiro Otomo was born in April of 1954 in the Miyago prefecture of Japan. In high school, Otomo in his own words became “crazy about the movies”. Otomo was attracted to the trend of movies at the time capturing the spirit of the new youthful unrest and rebellion all over the world. He was influenced by such movies as Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, and Five Easy Pieces. After graduating, Otomo went off to Tokyo to become a comic artist. His first professional work was an adaption of Mateo Falcone, a novella by Prosper Merimee. Over the next few years Otomo created a number of short stories like “Fireball” and “Sound of Sand”. Fireball, which production was started on in 1979 , is still unfinished (otomo couldn’t decide on which ending he liked better.) Otomo’s first great work was Domu: a Child’s Dream in 1980, which became an immediate hit with high school and College students in Japan at the time.
In 1983, Domu won Japan’s Science Fiction Grand Prix award, and was the first form of literature not in novel form to won such a distinction. Of course after Domu came Otomo’s masterpiece, Akira, which seamlessly combined the genres of psionics, cyberpunk, and post-modernism into a six volume story with over 2000 pages of artwork. Akira become a science fiction cultural phenomena in Japan, spawning video games, merchandise, and an anime adaptation which is compared by critics to movies such as Blade Runner, Clockwork Orange, and Mad Max. Akira has been translated into over a dozen languages, showing a testiment of its global appeal. Otomo’s current works are Legend of Mother Sara, a story of a mother trying to find her children in a postapocalyptic future, and Hunchback (with Alexandro Jodorowsky). The majority of Otomo’s stories are unique, if not somewhat disturbing. His works, no matter what the setting, are always social commentaries on the almost subterrainian levels of society filled with strange, often deranged characters. These works are dark and tragic in tone, filled with violence. Otomo’s art style is at the same time simplistic in terms of character and extremely complex in terms of setting and surroundings, making for an extremely realistic story.