Customer Reviews

Roman Album: Samurai Champloo

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1 star:		(1)

 

 

Any fan of the hip, visually stunning anime "Samurai Champloo" must have this companion book in their collection! With its synopsis guide for all 26 of the series' episodes, creator interviews, character sketches and more, ROMAN ALBUM: SAMURAI CHAMPLOO offers a nice behind-the-scenes look at the anime. The publisher did a great job translating this book, and I'm glad they kept the original right-to-left orientation for the layout.

Unfortunately, I do have a couple of small qualms. Considering how great the animation and designs are in the anime, I'd hoped ROMAN ALBUM to really showcase the artwork. But many of the production stills are microscopically small and hard to appreciate. (And here's my personal beef: there were no stills of ultra-sexy-Jin with his hair down from episode #26! Considering that's one of the rare scenes in the series where we see Jin with a difference appearance--his stint in drag notwithstanding--I think it would've been a nice treat.) I also would've liked to see more concept art from the anime production, and a short insert on the English voice cast who did a great job with the dubs.

Those brief issues aside, I've really been enjoying my copy of ROMAN ALBUM. Not only will other Champloo fans love it also, but anyone who is curious about the series and wants to sample a bit of what makes the anime so special.

The highlights of the Roman Album for me were the interviews and the information about the inspiration for some of the episodes. About half the book has a good amount of art and the other half is mainly text. The layout of the book is pretty nice overall, though most of the episode stills are quite small.

The editing on the Roman Album is awful and careless. The exact same description appears for both episode 8 and episode 10. The episode descriptions are often inaccurate as well. There are numerous grammatical and spelling errors throughout the book. I would have given this a much higher rating if the editing hadn't been so bad.

If You Liked the Series You will Like this book, plenty of nice art work of characters, would have liked if instead of small pictures it had larger pictures of scenes from the show. Has nice commentary section of how the show was made.

I was really looking forward to this Champloo title, but now it says it ships in one to three months. Does it even exist? Can anyone check?
The same thing happened with volumes 2 and 3 of the Samurai Champloo film manga. If you look at those, it says they ship in 1-3 months, but mine never came. I haven't seen them in any area bookstores and the publisher did not respond to my email.
Now they're saying the same thing for this art book just days after its publishing date.
It was a serious mistake not to publish all of these titles two summers ago, when the anime series first ran on Cartoon Network. They could have reached a much broader audience instead of a few still loyal fans.