For a long while now, I've wanted to own a complete set of Epic Comic's colorization of AKIRA. The last issue I needed arrived in the mail yesterday. This will be my 3rd read-through, first time in color. The Epic run of AKIRA was one of the first manga to be translated into English, and maybe the very first comic to ever be computer colorized. This definitely shows, it's like the colorist, Steve Oliff, didn't have his levels properly set in Photoshop because you can see where his darker blacks end and the lighter blacks of the original art begin. I flipped through some later issues, and it seems like this got fixed at some point, but at least in the first dozen issues, it's pretty noticeable. Also, according to fans, the translation is inferior to the Dark Horse 6-volume set.
Still, AKIRA is the only manga I've read front-to-back, one of my absolute favorite comics in general. I love being able to re-read it in color. I feel like one of my lesser holy grails has now been found! :)
Found this great explanation from Oliff about how Akira was colorized, at least in the beginning:
Two days after Christmas 1987, Federal Express delivered two boxes to my office in downtown Point Arena. It was an IBM 286 12mhz box, loaded with an AT&T Targa graphics board, DOS, their “Kaliedoscope” software, and a monitor. It also had a handmade heat diffuser to cool off the math co-processor.
Taped to the case was a one page sheet of instructions about how to run the system. It was very simple. I set it up and loaded in some of the disks of Akira art, then spent the next three months coloring Akira #1. The system chugged like an old farm truck. The software was buggy and the machine was erratic. It really needed that heat diffuser, because when it overheated (every day, some days many times a day), it froze, and I'd lose everything up to the last save. It got so bad that I'd save the page after every polygon (each traced off and enclosed area of color). I colored all but 3 or 4 pages, which Abel Mouton helped me with. Eventually.
In the early days, Kenny scanned the pages, then shipped me the disks. I colored them on the system, and sent the disks back to him. From there he made proofs and output the film. I didn't see a single proof until the issue came out in print for the first 10 issues. With issue #11 I got a printer and a scanner, so I could actually check things. All the issues before were kind of seat-of-your-pants, hope for the best.