a mission to assassinate Akira and Tetsuo in the latter half of the story after Akira has leveled Neo-Tokyo. Yamada plans to kill the two powerful psychics with darts containing a biological poison. He is later joined by a team of U.S. Marines to carry out the mission at the Olympic Stadium after it becomes the headquarters for Akira and Tetsuo's Great Tokyo Empire. However, the biochemical weapons fail to harm Tetsuo, instead of giving him temporary control of his expanding powers again, who proceeds to kill Yamada. Juvenile A is an international team of scientists who are appointed to investigate psychic events in Neo-Tokyo in the latter half of the story. Its members include , , , , , and lama . Production Conception Kodansha had been repeatedly asking Katsuhiro Otomo to write a series for their new manga magazine Young Magazine for some time, but he was busy with other work for another publisher and turned them down. After finishing Kanojo no Omoide... (1980) and Farewell to Weapons (1981) for Young Magazine, he started thinking of a new project. From the first meeting with the publisher, Akira was to be a short work of about ten chapters "or something like that," so Otomo said he was "really not" expecting it to be a success. Otomo had previously created Fireball (1979), a series in which he disregarded accepted manga art styles and established his interest in science fiction as a setting. Fireball anticipated a number of plot elements of Akira, with its story of young freedom fighters trying to rescue one of the group's older brother who was being used by the government in psychic experiments, with the older brother eventually unleashing a destructive "fireball" of energy (the story may have drawn inspiration from the Alfred Bester's 1953 novel The Demolished Man). Otomo used a science fiction setting again the following year in Domu, which won the Nihon SF Taisho Award and Seiun Award and became a bestseller. He then began work on his most ambitious work to date, Akira. Due to a lack of planning, Otomo had to hastily end Fireball without the finale he wanted and stated, "You could say that Akira was born from the frustration I had about that at the time." Not wanting to repeat what happened with that manga, he had the basic plot of Akira outlined from the start in a two-page