Bartkira

Bartkira

by James Harvey (Contributor), Danny Hynes (Contributor), Marcel O’Leary (Contributor)

Back in the early 1990’s, when anime was still called “Japanimation” and The Simpsons still featured Phil Hartman, no one could have conceived of the concept of Bartkira. Yet 23 years later, in Neo-Britain, artist Ryan Humphrey gave life to the unimaginable. His pages for the mind-bending crossover comic ignited a fire in the mind of comic artist James Harvey, who proposed the impossible:

Recreate every page of Akira using characters from The Simpsons.

It would take 768 artists, each contributing five pages, to redraw the full six volumes of Katsuhiro Otomo’s masterwork. A monumental group comic project unlike any other inspired working illustrators, comics professionals, and even some who had never drawn a comic in their lives. Now for the first time, the project that some have heralded as the greatest thing to ever happen to the Internet is here to destroy Floating World Comics.

Floating World is proud to present an exhibition book collecting 80 pages from the Bartkira project as well as a 16 page full color gallery section.

Featuring contributions by 19 artists: James Harvey, Danny Hynes, Marcel O’Leary, Michael Kim, Erica Henderson, Jacob Chabot, Cameron Stewart, Ben Ommundson, Brenton Barnes, Luke Novel, Richie Pope, Jon Huddleston, Jason Rainey, Cory Tran, Bodie Chewning, Alchemichael, Frans Boukas, Tyler Patrick Boss, and Ben Jelter. The full color gallery section includes illustrations by Wyatt Carroll, Jeremy Arambulo, Areil Vergez, Jaime Munoz, Alexandre Ghostthead, Rawn Gandy, Nick Sumida, and Ryan Humphrey. This exhibition book was curated by Frans Boukas with design assistance from Matt Deans.

Bartkira is intended to be a fan tribute to Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira and Matt Groening’s The Simpsons. This project is not endorsed by, nor affiliated with, either creator and does not represent itself as an official publication of any kind. All characters and location depicted herein remain the trademarked possessions of Otomo and Groening.

Genres: Comics, Graphic Novels

96 pages, Paperback

First published May 14, 2014

Reviews

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty darn fun for what it is, but it would have been a lot better had it not been so extremely abbreviated. Worth a look for mutual fans for sure, though.

[Andrew Nolan · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's cool, it's fun, it's well done, but it's still just one persons work written over the top of another persons work by a curated group of other people, so I can't give it more than 3 stars.

[Brit McGinnis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is wicked. It's fantastic.

I haven't read the original Akira yet, so take from it what you will. But I do know The Simpsons, so it was easy for me to get into the action that way. It's a great way to get introduced to this story and everything the creators tried to say.

The only quibble I have with this story is the fact that it's so many different art styles put together (which makes sense given the nature of the project). Some are barely clear, some don't work with the mood of the story at that time. But otherwise, a fantastic read.

[Cae Lynn · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a cool art book that's fun to flip through, but seeing as how it's less than a hundred pages of a roughly 2400 page story, the plot is much too fragmented to be an enjoyable read front-to-back if you're not already well versed in both works from which this is derived

[BlaBlaBla albalbalb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing, stylistic orgasm, fantasy for all fans, just amazing art!

[Remy · Rating 3 out of 5]

A cromulent read.

[Christian Patterson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I drew pages for this!! Not in this copy, but yeah, crazy enough but I'm in the full version of this :)