Yesterday I was at Barnes and Noble bookstore, and I saw a special edition manga of Akira and decided to pick it up for a friend of mine for Christmas. When I got home I paged through it, I own the movie and know it very well so I wanted to see how it looked in a manga. Now I have never read the manga before, so maybe it just has a different ending than the movie, but the last few pages of the manga were NOTHING like the ending of the movie. Tetsuo never even transformed into that big gross mutation. And theres no showdown between Tetsuo and Kaneda in this manga. If anyone has seen the movie and read the manga and can tell me whats up it would help a lot. My first thought was that perhaps they published this edition in two installments, and I only had the first one, but this was not the case, I had the whole thing. It ends with the general telling Tetsuo that he is number 14, and Testue says something like "Number 14?!" and the general just says "Precisely", and that the last frame in the book. Is this the way the manga is supposed to end?

i also really like the movie
but i only have vol 1-3 of the maga(there expensive)
so i havnt read the ending yet
but that doesnt sound that good
(how much was the b & n special edition book)

i just borrowed my mates copy, and i was just as suprised at the ending

the movie akira compressed something like 170 volumes of manga into one movie so there are bound to be changes however owning all the manga (and putting into one book) you would have to cut out just as much. It is one of the longest running manga ever made.

Okay, mystery solved. A couple of days ago I went back to the bookstore where I bought it from to see what the heck was up. For some COMPLETELY lame reason Barnes and Noble decided to put out a limited edition, hard cover version of the first part of the Akira manga, and ONLY the first part. Its contents are absolutely no different than the paper back edition, even though this new hard cover edition makes it look like its the whole story from the way its packaged, it is in fact simply the exact same thing as the paperback edition, except thats its hardcover and has a different cover design.
Just as before, if you want to get the whole think you must buy all six individual editions. This really sucks, because the whole reason I bought that hardcover version was so my friend could have the whole manga for Christmas. Now when I give it to him it will be like saying "Hey, heres part of a present, now you go out and buy the rest". Also the sales person I talked to said it wasn't like they were going to make every edition in hard cover, just this first one. So even if you did want to buy this hard cover edition, if you buy the rest of the series, although the content will be the same, it'll look weird because you'll have one really nice hardcover fancy first edition, than crapulated paper back editions to finish out the series.
>large sweat drop forms on the side of my forehead due to frustration<