Title: MechaForce
Subtitle: Draw Futuristic Robots that Fly, Fight, Battle and Brawl
ISBN-10: 1-60061-014-5
ISBN-13: 978-1-60061-014-1
Publisher: IMPACT
Author: E.J. Su
Publication Date: 2008
Series: None
Price: $19.99/$23.99Cn
Pagecount: 112
Color: Yes
Breasts: No
Short Impression: Half is the standard "a little bit of everything," but the
     rest is a useful series of case studies in perspective for a few
     designs.  No transforming robots, though.  Otherwise, definitely worth
     getting if you've got intermediate skills.

     Oddly, given that Su's main claim to fame right now is the IDW
Transformers comics, there's no mention of transforming robots in this book,
or really an attempt to cover them.
     The book is split into three sections.  The first is your basic "here's
how to draw perspective lines, shading, etc" chunk that's not too useful to
anyone.  Either you're too unskilled to learn much, or skilled enough you
already know it, making them pretty much a waste of pages.  Most of this
section is dedicated to perspective, though, allowing Su to go into enough
depth to be useful, and laying the groundwork for the third section.  And,
thankfully, he avoids the cliched "here's the tools of the trade" page with
photos of pencils and Koh-i-noors.
     The second section goes into general robot design theory...types of
limbs, torsos, and so forth.  Not too bad, but there's not enough examples to
function as a reference guide, while being enough to eat up more pages than
are really merited.
     The third section is where this book separates itself from the pack.
Picking a limited number of designs, Su shows how to draw each of them from
multiple perspectives and in multiple poses.  There's a basic humanoid mech
reminiscent of the Brocken from Patlabor, a more extreme "Giant Robo" style
with huge shoudlers and boots, an angel-winged mech, a dragonfly-winged
femmebot, and a mecha-dragon.  Each is shown in the following views: front
static, three-quarter static, bird's eye, worm's eye, and a battle pose (the
femmebot doesn't get a battle pose, though).
Each pose gets two pages, showing ball-and-stick, rough blocking, finished
pencils, inked drawing, and then full color.  Finally, there's a few pages on
composing a panel and showing several of the sample robots in one-on-one
melee to demonstrate interactions.
     All in all, while it's not without "chaff" eating up page count, I
consider this to be one of the best "how to draw robots" books I've seen to
date.  The use of a limited number of example characters to show off
perspective is a lot more likely to help beginning and intermediate artists
improve their skills.  About the only way I could improve this would be to
remove some of the general technique pages and add in the five poses for a
transforming mech.