Akira Gets A Simpsons Makeover Courtesy Of Almost 800 Artists
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It seems like every six months or so we here another round of news about the long-gestating, live-action adaptation of Akira. Of course, many die-hard Akira fans think a live-action version is a terrible idea, especially coming out of the Hollywood system, which tends to play fast and loose with fidelity to the original source material (Hi there, white Kaneda!). At this point, it’s anybody’s guess whether the Akira movie will ever actually make its way to the screen, or if it’ll just continue popping its head up every once in a while, like a considerably less cute Punxsutawney Phil. In the meantime, how about we focus on a much more awesome related project: an Akira/Simpsons mashup project, courtesy of nearly 800 different artists.
The project didn’t start out this huge, obviously. Artist Ryan Humphrey drew some Simpsons/Akira mashup art…
…and then artist James Harvey decided to organize what became a massive crowdsourced project via Tumblr. I’m guessing they weren’t expecting the number of artists participating to swell to quite the current number, but early on Harvey laid down some ground rules. For instance, all bikes from the original manga became Bart-friendly skateboards in this new version, and Neo-Tokyo became Springfield. Harvey also put together a chart assigning Simpsons characters to Akira roles, so all the artist’s submissions would be consistent in content, if not in style. (You can click the below image for a larger version of the chart.)
Those artists went on to reinterpret some 2,000 pages worth of Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira manga.
Art by Cameron Stewart
Art by Tait Howard
Art by Wyatt Carroll
Art by Richie Pope
Art by Natali Koromoto
Art by Brennan Bova
Art by Jonathan Saunders
Art via SpaceAgedPolymerArt
Art via Mallory Hodgkin
These are obviously just a small sampling from the massive project. You can check out tons more via the #Bartkira tag on Tumblr. We’ve also included individual links to the artists on all the images above. And a tip of the hat from GFR to all these talented folks!
