Akira

Life was good for Jordan Peele — star of a massively successful sketch comedy show, a nice little recurring role on FX’s Fargo, and he’s married to Chelsea Peretti, one of the coolest, funniest women currently working. Then he sprung his directorial debut Get Out on an unsuspecting America and everything rocketed to the next level. The massive windfall he conjured with a paltry $4.5 million budget blew open the gates of Hollywood for him, and like all novice filmmakers, a high-profile sophomore feature can’t be far off. Today brings the news as to what that next step might be, and it appears that Warner Bros. has big plans for Peele.

Whether you choose to overlook the accusations of whitewashing levied against Paramount’s upcoming Ghost in the Shell movie is entirely up to you, but there are certainly some who are rooting for the film to open doors for other anime projects. Studios aren’t exactly hot-spots for innovative thinking; if Ghost in the Shell bombs next weekend, there will no-doubt be executives at Paramount who claim the only real lesson is that American audiences don’t like Anime. That would be a real blow to fans of the long-gestating adaptation of Akira, the seminal 1988 animated movie by Katsuhiro Otomo that has been an inspiration to countless science fiction movies and television shows that follow.

In honor of the caped crusaders of the convention scene, ComicsAlliance has created Best Cosplay Ever (This Week), an ongoing collection of some of the most impeccable, creative, and clever costumes that we’ve discovered and assembled into a super-showcase of pure fan-devoted talent. This week's best cosplay ever includes D.Va, Starfire, Nightwing, Kaneda, Ramona Flowers and more!

On this day in 1982, the first issue of Akira was published. Written and illustrated by Katsuhiro Otomo, this post-apocalyptic tale was crucial in the popularization of manga outside of Japan.

The weekend is here! Take a look back at what’s happened in the past seven days. New comics, new stories, new podcasts, new art being made — it’s all part of the ComicsAlliance Weekender!

With Screen & Page we typically explore the relationship between anime shows or films and the manga series inspired by them, but today we're making an exception for a manga and anime produced in overlapping schedules by the same author, where the anime is more famous in the West, but both works deserve to be regarded as essential. It's a big one, the Holy Grail. We're talking about Katsuhiro Otomo's landmark work Akira, serialized in manga form from 1982 to 1990, and released as a feature film in 1988.

A live action remake of the beloved 1988 anime Akira, based on Katsuhiro Otomo's hugely popular manga of the same name, has been floating around Hollywood for over a decade, attracting and dropping actors and directors at a shocking rate (at one point, Garrett Hedlund and Kristen Stewart were set to star). For whatever reason, this film doesn’t want to get made. But Warner Bros. isn’t giving up on this project and if a new rumor is to be believed, they’ve officially reached out to one of the most powerful and popular filmmakers in their regular employ to make it happen. So, how do you feel about not one, but three Akira films produced by Christopher Nolan?

In a huge move for improving access to manga, Comixology has announced a partnership with publisher Kodansha to bring huge volumes of their manga library to its digital comics service. That means you have one less reason to say, "I don't read Manga"! With a whole range of amazing titles coming online, perhaps it's time to try out series like Noragami, The Seven Deadly Sins, or the blockbuster hit Attack on Titan and its various spin-offs.

Hosted every year in France, the Angoulême International Comics Festival is the biggest comic con in the world, surpassing even San Diego’s mighty Comic-Con International by tens of thousands of attendees. But like the San Diego show and its Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, Angoulême comes with its own venerable awards celebrating sequential art from around the world, the most auspicious of which is the Angoulême Grand Prix, given every year to a living comics creator as a kind of lifetime achievement award. This year’s went to a most deserving artist indeed: Katsuhiro Otomo, creator of one of the medium's undisputed masterworks, Akira.

Each weekday, ComicsAlliance brings you a carefully selected variety of links from around the web about comics and comics-related media, including movies, video games, toys, and whatever else might be worth noting. Quite frankly, these are items you may just need to know about to have a productive day. Take a look at today's hand-picked links after the jump.