Akira opens with Tokyo E*X*P*L*O*D*I*N*G. Years later, and it's now Neo-Tokyo, and it's about to E*X*P*L*O*D*E. A biker gang full of lively young assholes racing on the motorway yelling each other's names through the heart of destruction run into a strange, tiny, shrunken old man who makes a motorbike esplode. Sorry, E*S*P*L*O*D*E. That's pretty much the start of things E*X*P*L*O*D*I*N*G all over the place, including the friendship between young biker assholes Kaneda and Tetsuo, with the latter suddenly finding amazing psychic powers triggered inside himself that lets him E*X*P*L*O*D*E things like windows and doors and people. Friendship turns to murderous rivalry and all-out warfare with stuff E*X*P*L*O*D*I*N*G all over the place, but it's still pretty small-scale, relatively. There's also a secret military project and an underground resistance and the mysterious A-KI-RA who seems to make everyone's pants E*X*P*L*O*D*E with terror.

It's utterly astonishing. The scale, they style, the energy, the scope, the E*X*P*L*O*D*I*N*G, are like absolutely nothing else. E*X*P*L*E*X*E*L*L*E*N*T.