Tobias Kwan

Harvey was elated as the first pages rolled in. Each one was "a new treat," he says, a different and oftentimes surprising take on the Bartkira ideas. Kaneda's iconic red motorcycle, for instance, is sometimes a bicycle or a skateboard. Some pages were drawn in black and white with nothing but a Biro pen while others were a kaleidoscope of color, mashing goopy characters together into a cartoon acid trip. "Every day there was a new, amazing thing that took me back and just reminded me why this was such a good idea," Harvey says. Humphrey contributed some pages too. "James said to me, 'You made it,'" he explains. "You can do whatever pages you want, in whatever way you want.'" So he took five from "Volume 1," a single page slap-bang in the middle of the volume, and four toward the end, when Tetsuo-Millhouse is being chased by Kaneda's ally Yamagata, played by Nelson, and other motorcycle gang members. Humphrey deployed the same style used in his original drawings: just a pencil, some Moleskine paper and a splash of watercolor paints. "The way I draw lines is very wishy-washy, and I wanted to keep that," he says. "I wanted to keep my own way of drawing so you can tell this is my work, but also, you can tell there are still essences of the original manga throughout."

Harvey did a lot of editing with "Volume 1." He wanted it to read like "a real comic book" from start to finish, which meant ensuring a level of narrative consistency throughout. If characters suddenly swapped or were unrecognizable for some reason, he would make adjustments in Photoshop. "It was quicker for me to do that than to ask the artist to do it," he says. "Because it was either a minute in Photoshop or me having to email them and wait, and create of all this extra work for them."

But some artists weren't happy with the changes. At the time, Harvey thought his actions were justified -- he was technically the project's editor in chief, after all. In hindsight, however, he admits that was a "mistake." "Volume 1," he says, was an experiment that taught him some valuable lessons for the remaining five books.

Initially, Harvey thought the first volume would be completed in six months. But it ended up taking a year, by which point many of the artists had already shared their pages online. The numerous postings on Tumblr and Instagram were great for the project's reputation and attracting new contributors. But it meant the first complete edition landed with a dull thud. The project had already had its moment, and people were posting their own, original fan art with the Bartkira hashtag. "So it wasn't this huge moment as I thought," Harvey says.

"Flipping through the pages is exhilarating. It's like talking to a series of strangers at a house party."

Still, artists relished the chance to compare their work with the other contributors. At last, they could see and understand how their pages fit into the larger narrative and what it was like for the reader to flow from one artist to the next. "Flipping through the pages is exhilarating. It's like talking to a series of strangers at a house party," Matthew Smallwood, an illustrator and Bartkira contributor, says. "Transitions from one person to the next can be exciting, jarring, funny, even sublime."

Filippo Morini, another artist who worked on the project, adds, "The result is astonishing, schizophrenic and beautifully chaotic. It's like driving full speed through a super curvy road where you can't see what will come up beyond the next turn, but you keep riding full throttle because the landscape around you is terrific and your eyes want to catch as much as they can."

James Harvey inside Orbital Comics in London

For "Volume 2," Harvey took a different approach. To accelerate the production schedule, he started giving artists firmer deadlines. If they didn't submit in time, he would hand the pages off to someone else on the waiting list. It was a tough stance but a fairer one for all the people working hard to meet the original due date. He also expanded his operation, recruiting editors and friends to chase artists and check their work for mistakes. The extra help made a difference. "Volume 2" came out in October 2014, less than four months after the first installment. "Volume 3" arrived in July 2015, alongside a fan-made Bartkira trailer. Like the crowdsourced comic, the video was a collaborative effort involving more than 50 artists. It showed Tetsuo-Milhouse's collision with Takashi, the bar where Kaneda-Bart and his friends hang out, and the underground facility holding Akira-Ralph -- small but distinct glimpses of the landmark film.

While the animation was new, the original Akira soundtrack and voice work remained underneath. "To hear the voices and the theme song of Akira," Humphrey recalls, "I thought, 'Oh, my god, this is so crazy. It's great when you see people's pages, because you use your own imagination, but to see it all animated is a different story."

The project was coordinated by Kaitlin Sullivan, an animation producer and contributor on Bartkira, "Volume 1." "I wasn't about to tackle the whole movie, so I found a trailer I liked and pitched the idea to Ryan and James as a failed FOX concept stuffed on a 'Do the Bartman' VHS," she explains.

Sullivan had organized a similar project in 2014, recreating an episode of Sailor Moon with over 250 animators. Both projects made a huge splash online: At the time of writing, the Bartkira trailer has 320,000 plays on Vimeo and 775,000 views on YouTube. It was picked up in the press too, drawing more attention to the rest of the project.

"Two things are certain in life: You're going to go through the whole production convinced you're a failure and it'll never work and everyone will hate you for it, and when you're done, every single piece of positive feedback feels like the greatest gift you've ever received," Sullivan says. "Whether it's from Le Monde or a stranger on the internet, I just couldn't stop smiling. It was worth every second of work."