Manga Techniques: Robot Design Techniques for Beginners
Subtitle: An Instruciton Manual for Manga Artists Around the World
ISBN: 4-88996-099-6
Publisher: Japan Publications Trading Co. (US distributor)
Author: None listed.  Shunji Haraguchi editor.
Publication Date in English: December 2002
Series: Manga Techniques (vol 3)
Price: $12.99
Pagecount: 84 (final 4 are blank art paper with blue rule markings)
Color: No.
Breasts: No.
Short Impression: Computer-generated robot art makes it easy to show
     variations on a theme.  Translation is a bit...off...at times.

     While there's the obligatory "here's how to do proportions and
perspective and details and stuff" section at the front, this is almost
exclusively an example book.  Unlike other books I've read to date (September
2004), it uses little or no hand-drawn material...all of the robot stuff is
computer generated.  This lets them easily take a core model and modify it in
various ways to depict different styles of character.
     The strength of this book is in showing these variations on a theme.
Between a heavy emphasis on silhouette and symbolic shapes (rounded for
strong bots, angular for fast, etc) and the use of computer modeling, it's
pretty thorough in terms of showing off a number of basic design themes.
Hero robots, sidekicks, brutes, monsters, femmebots, etc.
     The main weakness, aside from a tendency towards reading like it was
translated using a computer program, is that the CG art tends to obscure the
process.  It's all finished, detailed work, with very little in terms of
intermediate steps shown.  So, while the general advice on shapes and
proportions is good for beginners, this is otherwise not so useful for anyone
not already fairly advanced in their technique.  This makes the inclusion of
four practice pages of nice art paper rather ironic, since the examples in
this book were not produced on paper, nor will they really help you with your
paper technique.
     And, apparently, a veneer will let you fly in space.  :)  (They mean
vernier.)