blog:nattoli, tag:AZ PLAY

Railway Girls and Scenery Pictorial Book (鉄道少女百景) is a collection of all newly illustrated works featuring fictional girls at real life train stations and railways. Much like in previous pictorial books that have come out, information about the trains is provided throughout the art book.

If you've ever seen Ito Satoshi's art work, you've probably noticed it's strongly influenced by Western fantasy art, and is reminiscent of the Dungeons & Dragons art work I would spend hours gazing at as a kid. As a result, Ito's style all but re-invisions some of the popular anime characters we know (like San, from Princess Mononoke, pictured above) in a seemingly more realistic way.

FUFUFU 2010 is a fan art illustration collection by Vinhnyu that was released at the July 2010 Japan EXPO held in Paris, which features art work from Final Fantasy, Vocaloid, and K-ON! among others. Vinhnyu also made his debut this year as a published illustrator in Japan, winning the mascot design competition for Kotobukiya's OTACOOL books, which showcase various aspects of anime fandom around the world.

I have to admit, I went for this doujinshi because of the cover girl---she just looks like someone who belongs in the Black Rock Shooter universe ^^; First Line is Kushima Rei's first doujinshi publication, and it came out during the Winter 2009 Comiket.

Wonderland is the latest illustration collection from Chisato Naruse, having been released during COMIC 1☆4 at the end of April. It's a compilation doujinshi, featuring her favorites from 6 years of illustration, 2003 through 2009. The only new illustration in this volume is the cover art work, featuring Chisato Naruse's version of Alice in Wonderland.

REW, read as 'Rewind' is a 5-year collection of Kurehito Misaki's illustrations, which includes a lot of original works as well as some fan arts and Touhou illustrations. Sold exclusively through Toranoana, this compilation book was released during the Tora Festival 2010 (とら祭り2010).

For Comitia 92, RubiconHearts released their second publication, titled Neko to Shoujo (猫と少女), featuring a collection of illustrations of girls and cats by Take (竹), Tsunekawa Niwasuke (常川庭助), Ame (雨), and Yuu (優). While it doesn't have the famous illustrators of the first collection『Kyoto, Spring.』, it does continue to maintain the high standards of quality the circle set for themselves during Comiket 77.

Fancy Frontier is a comic convention much like Comic Market, except it's held in Taiwan. Even so, it attracts a lot Japanese artists who do exclusive art work for the convention, and Splendid Banquet - Taiwan Limited Illustrations is a great example of that. Artists like Aoi Nanase, Kisaragi Mizu, Tony Taka, Ramiya Ryo, REI, Amamiya Polan, Tokumi Yuiko, Mutsumi Sasaki, Noriyuki Matsumoto, and Carnelian have all done covers for the Fancy Frontier Magazine, and this art book collects their cover illustrations from 2005 through 2007.

For almost a year now, Toranoana has been having gallery exhibitions of popular artists, and at these events you can buy a large B4-sized 'pamphlet' that includes the artists' works that were on display in a book format. Alpha's (有葉) gallery was the most recent one, having ran from May 19th through the 28th and the amusingly titled Pictures at an Exhibition of Alpha was the companion pamphlet.

The long awaited PRISMTONE Range Murata Anime Works 1998-2006 has been released after more than a year of postponed release dates and delays, collecting Murata's works on Blue Submarine no. 6, Last Exile, and Mardock Scramble. This 344-page art book showcases Range Murata's art works in a variety of different presentation styles; from colored sketches and multiple variable length fold-out posters, to monochrome roughs.

AKABEi SOFT2 Illustration Collection is an art book much in the same vein as previous memorial illustration books to have come out over the past year like MOONSTONE Complete and Circus 10th Visual Album. The major difference with this one is that AKABEi SOFT2 hasn't really been around anywhere near long enough to bring out this kind of memorial collection. I think they just jumped onto the recent trend with this one ^^;

PIECES 2 Phantom Cats is essentially a small and compact version of the popular and rare Galgrease Galhound poster books that Masamune Shirow released circa 2002 and 2003. The illustrations were originally distributed as magazine extras, but you can now have it all in one with PIECES 2, though of course, they're not posters anymore ^^