His father, Douglas Akins, was a sign painter, graphic designer and pioneering African American cartoonist at the Chicago Defender through the 1940s to 1960s before becoming the paper's Society Editor.
[citation needed] Akins was a founding member of the "statiCCreeps", a shadow-guild of artist/creators that pioneered a hybrid of Japanese manga in mainstream American comics during the late 1980s to early 1990s.
The only published work by Akins that shows evidence of this is in Comico Comics Red Dragon which was written by Brian Azzarello (100 Bullets) in 1992.
For First Comics (also in Chicago) he works on titles such as Mundan's Bar and one of a rarefied cadre of guest artists on the venerable Mike Baron/Steve Rude series Nexus.
At Dark Horse Akins worked across licensed sci-fi titles from Aliens (Colonial Marines) to Star Wars (Tales of the Jedi: The Freedon Nadd Uprising) and pencilled the adaptation of Andrew Vachss story "Warlord" (the only play written by Vachss) in the Hard Boilded series for Dark Horse.