Due to the numerous art book delays at the end of May, I was able to get Mika Akitaka Mobile Suit Girl Art Works a lot sooner than I'd expected. My first impressions are good, it had a whole lot more art work than I had expected---I was bracing myself for more sketch work and process pages based on the contents of the first art book, but there weren't any.

Mika Akitaka MS Girl Art Works is 96-pages in length, and features a total of 66 different MS Gundam Girls. There is also a double sided fold-out poster featuring the cover art work on one side, and Unicorn Gundam in destroy-mode on the other.

Unlike a lot of artists these days, Akitaka Mika still works directly with hand-drawn pencil line arts, and then colors in his characters digitally. As a result, the black outlines look rougher, and more sketch-like than one might be used to seeing in recent art books. The book binding is tight and glue-bound with no overlap, so the few images that are spread over two pages tend to look quite cut off.

The art book is divided into four sections titled "Character Side" , "Gundam ACE" , "FIX CAFE" , and "Kyoushiro MANIAX". "Character Side" includes illustrations from the magazine Character Model (キャラクター モデル) that ran in the issues from 2001 through 2004 and are the oldest illustrations in the book. The "Gundam ACE" section features illustrations that ran in the magazine of the same name, which are more current from 2004 to 2010.

The "FIX CAFE" Gundam girls are for the most part waitresses blended with Gundams, and this was also a feature that ran in Gundam ACE magazine. The addition of skirts and other clothing items looks outside of Akitaka Mika's usual style, but it still works aesthetically. The "Kyoushiro Maniax" section only has four Gundam Girls, but I really don't recognize the designs for these, like the Dokuro Zaku pictured above.

Mika Akitaka Mobile Suit Girl Art Works finishes with artist comments on all of the illustrations, along with a Q&A session on specific art works, with regards to ideas and inspirations. The adaptation that goes into Akitaka Mika's designs to make each Gundam recognizable, but still believable as suits still makes for a nice collection of illustrations even 16 years after his first book came out.

• Title: Mika Akitaka Mobile Suit Girl Art Works
• タイトル: MOBILE SUIT GIRL 明貴美加MS少女アートワークス
• Pages: 96
• Release date: 03/24/2010
• Buy: Amazon Japan