Akira, Vol. 3

After the events of the first 2 volumes, we continue following Kaneda and the rest of the characters trying to understand and react to everything that's happening.

This volume focus a lot more of its time in the political and military aspect of the story, which raises interesting topics and give a lot more depth to the aspects we were introduce before.
We see more talks about the political landscape, what are the moves of the military and the motivations for characters like Mr. Nezu and Colonel Shikishima. This help to enhance and give more meaning to all of what's happening and its themes.
At the same time, the mystery grows in complexity and involves aspects as religion and war, another thing that helps give more depth to the series.
But continues with problems of characterization on Kaneda and the others, feeling more like just charismatic and comedic entities and less than complex characters with different motivations. At this point, I feel the manga doesn't want to give them alot more depht and just focus itself on the themes and mistery of the story. This can alianate some readers but gain anothers, so it's really a matter of preferences.

To conclude, I think this is the best volume yet and the one that raises the stakes of the story a lot more, given more complexity to its themes and the one that start separate Akira from other works.

Okay, the first 2/3 of this volume was a bit frustrating and had it ended there, I may have only given it 3 stars, BUT the last 1/3 was AMAZING! A few things I disliked about the beginning was that the use of ‘Deus ex Machina' was WAY overdone. Kaneda and Kei get out of so many things inexplicably that I was almost at eye-rolling by the 2/3 mark, not to mention the constant changing hands of the ‘prize' in ways that just seemed mind-boggling and then happened way too many times to the point that the plot lost all story and it was just a game of hot potato between all the different factions. We almost completely lose all storytelling in favor of action for the sake of action, which the previous volumes seemed to balance much better. Kaneda's immaturity, which I get is part of his character and is present for sure in other volumes, becomes rather annoying in this one, even childish at times with some of the dialogue really being dumbed down. But why did I give this 5 stars in the end? Because the end blows all that out of the water with a stunning conclusion that I didn't see coming and was phenomenally drawn. There was one gut punch after another and everything on the board is wiped out in one fell swoop, leaving a cliff-hanger ending that made me curse not having the next volume along with me. I can only hope that the issues at the beginning of this volume don't continue to show up with the change that happened toward the end, and that the story is given new vitality and direction in the coming volumes. So my advice is to push through the first part and you'll be rewarded at the end!