Katsuhiro Otomo comics

Does anyone get the feeling 'Domu' is in the same universe as Akira, kind of like a prequel? I have some things to go along with that. Where are people on the fence? Here are some of my points. In 'Domu' no adults, no civilians knew what the heck was going on with these kids with these powers. So what happens if the adults do discover that this is a thing, what's the first thing that's going to be done if the government finds out that there are people out there who have this ability, they’re going to weaponise that shit. Old Cho's superpowers, he can phase like little Takashi from Akira can… also the kids in Akira, they’re late sequels, the earliest one is #26, little Takashi… so what if Etsuko is #1. To add fuel to that concept, Akira’s set in 2019 so those kids in that are born in 2004/2005. Domu's set in the present, which would have been 1982. So if thinking that is the beginning, or the early stages of people, police, government officials, somebody becoming aware of some phenomenon, it would be a second or generation, it would have time to develop, to have some "hey let's dovetail some funding to explore this, we think we have a phenomenon on our hands…" maybe to be weaponised, certainly to be researched, and that’s the beginning, and you see essentially Akira would be two generations later… and the explosion happens in the nineties (2:17 P.M. on December 6th, 1992), Etsuko might have been a young teenager at that point. In the first volume of Akira, whenever Tetsuo starts to show signs of having the power, when Colonel Shikishima is talking with Doctor Onishi in the skyscraper, the Doctor suggests Tetsuo is about to awaken and he talks about having evidence of there being teenagers who have awoken before, suggesting that it's always children… like Etsuko. The other big thing that solidified it for me was the one moment where Tetsuo is leaving the Neo-Tokyo Military Hospital and the military guard is like "hey, how'd you get out of there?" and when we see that guy next his head’s splattered up against the wall, a scene which has shades of the student, Sasaki, who spends his time building balsa wood planes, slitting his throat and exploding all over the lobby of the Tsutsumi housing complex when he met with Etsuko for the first time and she was scared out of her wits. Visually it is hard not to see that as a callback, a corridor, almost even the same setting (Akira thereby becoming at least a thematic progression). When I think of the connection between those two works, one obvious one, and it's visual is in the art, the expression of the psychic powers really consistent, a lot of characters with their heads down, sweating, eyes bulging, it’s exactly the same as Old Cho. I think that’s fuel to it being the same universe, the same timeline, Tetsuo evidence of this future developing further because the psychic powers are represented exactly the same… and they coin the term psychokinesis in there which is expressed by levitating objects, flying and then if you want to take it down the furthest direction, what if Old Cho isn’t old at all but rather the use of the abilities is similar to Kiyoko's aged appearance. So think how contained Domu is, but once the government becomes aware of these abilities emerging, this is why Akira is so expansive in comparison, because the government involvement has created this massive infrastructure to try to control it. There's also a big part of me that makes me think Otomo's Fireball is a part of this universe as well. In Akira volume 1, when we see page 1 and the cataclysmic explosion, it’s not mentioned that Akira was the cause of that, it's only mentioned that a bomb was exploded over Tokyo. But what if that bomb was a couple of pages of Fireball, because the story ends where you see the globe of the Earth in the very last panel, so you could imagine the very next panel could have been that cataclysmic explosion/ mushroom cloud and all of that stuff, and that is the evidence of the military intervention of trying to figure out how to contain this power for weaponised use, because in Fireball it’s the government who is tearing this old guy/ soldier apart to try to see what’s making him tick, so I think it’s all related.