Katsuhiro Otomo is already of a venerable age, but he doesn’t seem to be anywhere close to considering the idea of stopping work. He is someone who greatly enjoys drawing and, without the need to work at a pace other than his own, continues to involve himself in different projects from time to time. That’s why it doesn’t surprise us that on social media, he has dropped one of the biggest bombs of the year for the manga world: the possibility of him working on a new manga.
According to an image he posted on Twitter, he has implied that he is working on a new manga. In it, he has drawn a picture of Kiyoko, the leader of the group of children with psychic powers from Akira, which is not a random choice. Why? Because one of her many abilities is her precognitive powers, the ability to see the future. The drawing is displayed on the message board of the Akira Cel Exhibition in Osaka, which ended on October 24th, focusing on his magnum opus, recently referenced in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2.
Indeed, Otomo didn’t stop there. In the drawing, Kiyoko says, in perfect Japanese, something that could be roughly translated as “I saw in a dream that my friend, a manga author, was drawing a new manga.” Otomo added to his own tweet, stating, “Kiyoko’s precognitive dreams come true.”
In other words, Katsuhiro Otomo is working on a new manga. However, it’s still too early to get excited. We don’t know more details about it, as he has only shared this cryptic yet straightforward announcement that he is working on a new manga. In the meantime, he has been overseeing the anime adaptation of the 2001 manga Orbital Era since 2019. This news is doubly sweet, as, at the age of 69, no one expected to see a new manga from this great master of modern comics.
