The classic anime film "Akira" debuted 30 years ago this month, but the manga on which it was based exploded onto the pages of Kodansha's Weekly Young Magazine six years earlier in 1982.

The cyberpunk comic was the creation of Katsuhiro Otomo, whose manga, "Domu," one of Weekly Young Magazine's first series, featured children with dangerous psychic powers. "Akira" expanded that idea onto a much larger canvas — a post-World War III Neo-Tokyo — that was populated with revolutionaries, rioters, corrupt politicians, drug dealers and biker gangs.

For many readers, "Akira" was a revelation. Each panel features a head-spinning amount of detail, and Otomo, an avowed film buff, keeps things moving at a breathless, cinematic pace. Comic writer Warren Ellis once called the manga "a headlong, super-adrenalized SF (sci-fi) adventure story that reinvented the term 'property damage.'"