Preserving the Project

Bartkira…

…is a fan art project that reimagines Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira manga and anime film using characters from The Simpsons. Inspired by Ryan Humphrey’s drawings, James Harvey expanded the idea into a worldwide project involving 768 artists from around the world to redraw all six volumes of Akira in the Bartkira style.

With the original Bartkira website now offline, this page serves as a backup archive of the project, keeping the complete comics available for everyone to download and read, alongside a new digitally enhanced, high-resolution CBZ edition.

About Bart(a)kira.

Katsuhiro Otomo’s seminal work, Akira, is one of the defining achievements of modern manga. Set in the dystopian world of Neo-Tokyo, it blends political unrest, biker culture, psychic powers and catastrophic science fiction into a cyberpunk story that became a landmark work of Japanese visual storytelling. It was serialised from 1982 to 1990 and adapted into the 1988 anime film that fundamentally changed the perception of anime worldwide, leaving a lasting mark on modern animation, science fiction and visual culture.

When Akira reached America in 1988 through Marvel’s Epic Comics, its black-and-white artwork was given an equally pioneering treatment. Steve Oliff and his Olyoptics studio digitally coloured the series using PixelCraft’s Kaleidoscope system on 12 MHz IBM 286 PCs, using an AT&T Targa graphics board, making Akira the first regular comic-book series produced using digital computer colouring – a process that helped transform comic-book production in the decades that followed.

Matt Groening’s world could hardly be further removed from Neo-Tokyo. Beginning with Life in Hell and exploding into popular culture with The Simpsons in 1989, Groening developed one of the most instantly recognisable visual languages in modern animation. Springfield’s deliberately simple characters, suburban absurdity and relentless satire became a global cultural shorthand, influencing television comedy and animation for decades. What began as a dysfunctional American family grew into an enormous cast of characters capable of parodying almost anything – including, eventually, Akira.

Bartkira was born from exactly that collision. Inspired by Ryan Humphrey’s original drawings that recast scenes from Akira using characters from The Simpsons, artist and organiser James Harvey expanded the idea into a massive international collaboration. A total of 768 artists were invited to reinterpret Katsuhiro Otomo’s complete six-volume manga, with each contributor assigned five pages and encouraged to redraw them in their own style while replacing Akira’s cast with The Simpsons characters with many cameos, visual jokes and deviations taking from other works of Matt Groening (like Futurama).

The result is a strange but remarkably coherent fusion of two completely different cultural worlds: the scale, violence and dystopian intensity of Akira filtered through the visual language and characters of The Simpsons. Rather than a single parody, Bartkira became a collective experiment in reinterpretation, where hundreds of individual styles formed one enormous fan-made version of Otomo’s story.

We created this page to preserve this remarkable project and keep it available for anyone who wants to experience the world of Bartkira.

Published 1 September 2026

Download Bartkira.

The Bartkira volumes were originally published as PDFs at a resolution that made sense at the time. On today’s high-resolution displays, the pages made for roughly 96 PPI screens render small and the lettering is often hard to read. Zooming in doesn’t do the comic justice either, because readers just do a simple interpolation – you do get a bigger image, but it’s blurry and falls apart. Viewed 1:1, the original pages are barely twice the size of the volume thumbnails below.

We reprocessed the entire collection with AI upscaling, so the art and dialogue hold up at full size on modern screens while preserving the look and feel of the originals.

NOTE: Only PDF-s are available currently. The CBZ archives will be available in a few days.

BeforeAfter

Original PDF

Enhanced CBZ

Original PDF

Enhanced CBZ

Original PDF

Enhanced CBZ

Original PDF

Enhanced CBZ

Original PDF

Enhanced CBZ

Original PDF

Enhanced CBZ

Upscaling procedure: original images were losslessly extracted from the original PDFs to PNGs, upscaled in Upscayl 2.15.0 using the Remacri (Real-ESRGAN) model, then encoded to AVIF with avifenc (libavif) at quality 80, speed 0, 10-bit depth and 4:4:4 chroma. The final files were packaged into a ZIP/CBZ container.

AI upscale processing time was 15 hours on 60 TFLOPS FP32 GPUs, while AVIF encode took 8 hours on 2 TFLOPS FP32 CPU.

DISCLAIMER

Bartkira was created as an independent, non-commercial fan art project. This archival page is maintained by NUIT d.o.o., which is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or otherwise officially associated with Katsuhiro Otomo, Kodansha, The Simpsons, 20th Television, Disney, or any other respective rights holders.

All characters, artwork, trademarks, titles, and other intellectual property remain the property of their respective owners. This page is provided solely for archival and preservation purposes. No ownership of the original works or underlying intellectual property is claimed, and no commercial use is intended.

If you are a rights holder and have any concerns regarding material made available on this page, please contact us and we will remove the material on request.

Explore the Project & The Originals
Original Bartkira site (Archived) The Story of Bartkira Akira × Simpsons Akira (Kodansha US) Akira (Kodansha JP) The Simpsons (Disney+)