Akira #4

Katsuhiro Otomo's landmark manga continues in this 2001 Carlsen Comics edition, packing a generous 400 pages into a single volume. The cover, rendered by Otomo himself in pencils and inks, presents a quietly unsettling image: a small boy in a military-style uniform seated on an imposing throne draped in sweeping red fabric, ruins and rubble stretching out behind him beneath an open sky. There's something deeply compelling about that contrast — the stillness of the child against the crumbling world around him — that captures exactly the kind of haunting atmosphere Otomo does so well.