Customer Reviews

Manga Design

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

What could be better for Manga fans than this chunky heavyweight book? The work of a hundred and fifty artists beautifully presented so you can compare their output, from the fragile, design oriented style of Maki Kusumoto to the gutsy in-your-face work of Tetsuo Hara or the child-like whimsy of Momoko Sakura. Each illustrator gets four pages, two with sample artwork and two for biographic detail and three cover reproductions in color. The back of the book has a Manga glossary and websites for some of the artists. I have a minor criticism of the book though, annoyingly the page numbers are only on the first spread of each artist and then positioned right into the spine.

Wait, there's more! As well as pages and pages of great comic artwork you get a knockout DVD, too. This has interviews with three artists, Usaruara Furuya, Naoki Urasawa and Reko Okano, lasting an hour and nicely they are presented as if they were speaking from frames on a comic page, plus there is a tour and interviews with four comic shop managers but the really great feature of the DVD are the nine hundred covers (presented in color and two at a time) and if you looked at each one for ten seconds you'll be watching for two hours and thirty minutes.

I think this is a pretty amazing package and OK, maybe it won't have everybody's favorite artist but I doubt you'll find anything better at this price.

I am very impressed with this book's selection of artists. The problem is some of the images are mismatched, repeated, or noticably missing. I hope these errors will be fixed in a future printing or edition.

The book should get 5 stars but the editing mistakes are truly confusing, especially if you are unfamiliar with a particular artist's work. Each artist is supposed to have a couple pages of art as an example of their work, and in some cases the art is obviously not that of the artist being showcased. It's frustrating because the book is otherwise great! Also, the writing suffers from 'engrish' spelling and grammatical errors, but I actually like that! Either way, still a great reference for serious manga fans.

This is a heavy chunk of a book with lots of visuals featuring samples of the manga pages in the native Japanese language and thumbnails of selected manga cover art. The samples come in greyscale or full colour which I think is quite a bonus! Categories are sorted by manga-ka (manga author) and although it doesn't feature all the manga artists you might expect (for example Yumiko Igarashi who did the 'Candy Candy' series), most of the authors I love are in there, albeit their biography could do with some updating. Some of the content layout are confusing as what the other reviewers had said, there are a few discrepancies to be found. Otherwise, it's a really good book for re-reading & reference. The DVD-rom included makes for an interesting view too.