Akira Lego

Already in October/November last year, on the occasion of Designer Con in Pasadena, California, some people re-created comic book covers with Lego bricks and put pictures of them online, mostly on Flickr in the group Comic Bricks! and/or using the tag “comicbricks” (Nerdist and several other websites reported). Some of these pictures are fascinating in the way in which a three-dimensional object was extrapolated from a two-dimensional cover, e.g. the iconic “Demon in a Bottle” Iron Man cover.

The most interesting Lego cover from my perspective is, of course, the only one in that Flickr photo pool that is based on a manga cover: Akira #31. Its mere existence among otherwise American comics is remarkable. Then again, an issue from the old, coloured, 38-part Epic Comics edition was used, which was more like a US comic book than the later black-and-white collected volumes.

The creator of this Lego cover retained the abstract elements of the cover and interpreted them as a sort of window frame through which we see Kaneda and Kai riding the ‘caretaker’ robot. In contrast to the original cover, though, one leg of the robot extends through this frame in the front, while another robot leg can be seen extending to the right behind the frame (and also parts of the wall in the background to both sides), making for an imaginative compromise between 2-D and 3-D elements which, as far as I’ve seen, hasn’t been tried in any of the other Comic Bricks covers.

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