How To Draw Manga: Transforming Robots
ISBN: 1-84510-973-2
Publisher: Top That! Publishing
Author: None listed
Publication Date: 2005
Series: How To Draw Manga (no relation to Graphic Sha's)
Price: $7.99
Pagecount: 48
Color: Full
Breasts: No
Short Impression: Stereotypical kidbook on drawing, sadly.

     I had a BN.com coupon code, so I decided to go looking for any How To
Draw books that I hadn't seen in stores, and I found two that looked like
they might be worth grabbing.  This was the cheaper of the two.  :)  
     While published in 2005, it feels like it might have been written five
or more years earlier and simply updated a little.  It feels the need to
explain what manga is (and the explanation is pretty bad), and has the
obligatory photo of "professional tools" that is to drawing books what the
"the Eohippus was about the size of a fox terrier" is to biology textbooks.
Except at least fox terriers are still around...as I'll go into more detail
about in the next review, anyone who actually aspires to professional art
these days may never put pen to paper.  It's all tablet and Photoshop.  Oh,
there's a few mentions here and there of computer techniques, and a
comparison at the very end between watercolored and computer colored work,
but this is otherwise very much the sort of thing you might have found rushed
out in the 1980s to take advantage of the first Transformers boom.
     If you really want a copy of this, though, you might want to hurry.  You
see, two factions of robots are used for the characters in this book, the
Anemotrons (badguys, with most of the beastforms) and...the heroic
Megatrons.  I smell lawsuit.
     The book opens with a compressed form of the usual "lessons" on
perspective and drawing with primitives, but most of the book involves
showing different robot mode characters drawn in five steps.  Ball and stick,
primitive blocks, rough pencils, tightened pencils, finished (and mainly
computer colored) pictures.  Altmodes get two pages at the very end, and
there's not even a small inset of the altmodes of each of these characters to
give some idea that the artist gave thought to transformation (and in several
cases, the altmodes will require a lot of cheating to not look hideous).
     I suppose the examples of steps one and two might be useful to beginning
artists, but the designs are pretty lame, I wouldn't even want to steal ideas
from them.