Robot 5

Robot #5

by Range Murata, Yoshitoshi Abe, Hyung-Tae Kim

Rare Book

Genres: Manga, Art, Comics, Graphic Novels

160 pages, Paperback

First published April 10, 2006

About the author

Range Murata (村田 蓮爾 Murata Renji, born October 2, 1968, in Osaka) is a Japanese artist and designer, known for his unique style combining Dieselpunk and Japanese anime elements. He is best known for his conceptual design work on anime series Last Exile and Blue Submarine No. 6.

He began his career in the early 1990s doing design work for video games, including having done the character designs for the 2003 PlayStation 2 game Spy Fiction.

He has published more than a dozen books of his work, some of the most notable being rule and futurhythm. He is also voted "Best Artist of the Year" 2006 in the Seiun Award.

Reviews

[Parka · Rating 3 out of 5]

(More pictures at parkablogs.com)

Robot is a Japanese manga anthology. This English version is translated by Udon.

Basically, this is sort of a portfolio books for the artists. They are Range Murata, Neovision, Hyung-Tae Kim, Mani Itou, Suzuhito Yasuda, Shigeki Maeshima, Yusuke Kozaki, Hirotaka Maeda, Sabe, Miggy, Yoshitoshi Abe, Micho Murakawa, Imperial Boy, Shin Nagasawa, Fujijun, Hiroyuki Asada, Yumi Tada, Shuzilow.Ha and Nick Stick Robot-kun.

Some of the stories are continuation from previous volumes, others are just standalone. As with continuation, if you don't have the previous volume, the stories won't make a lot of sense. Besides, Japanese comic plots are a little hard to grasp in the first place. Storytelling is definitely not the reason you'll want to buy this book for. With so many artists, the variety of art is great. Some are very beautifully illustrated, while others go for the more comical line art.

This book is a mixed bag for me. I'll probably give it 3 stars out of 5. Well, a good comics anthology should have more better stories. Or it could have been a better art book if they scrap storytelling altogether.