manga by Fujioka Kenki, illustrator for Advance of Zeta.
I’ve seen this on Amazon Japan for quite a while but I don’t know much about it. Recently a good friend sent me some scans. The mechanical designs are just what you’d expect from from Fujioka: lots of complex mechanical realism and of course, bevels!
The designs themselves seem to be kind of Steampunk, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that!
Japanese Title: DOLLMASTER-蒼穹の翼
Language: Japanese
August 8th, 2007 at 12:25 pm
This looks neat! It almost looks like theres a Camera on the front of that machine! You know, there are some mecha artists and Gunpla designers that “add detail” to machines that weren’t quite so complex. Katoki does this a lot and the HCM-Pro line likes to rape detail in the rear, but whenever Fuijioka adds some detail to his machines (like on AoZ volume covers and such) it just looks good and makes sense. There is lots of detail, but its purpose-filled detail that makes it different than slapping some silly vents on a panel.
August 8th, 2007 at 12:31 pm
I think that is a camera! The lineart details from inside the book show that machine with a couple of different options, one is a gun, and one is that thing which definitely looks like a camera.
December 3rd, 2008 at 10:58 am
I can’t tell you much about the story as I don’t read much Japanese. The plot seem to follow a young man who pilots the Sunset Sparrow (shown on cover). During the course of the story he takes on various baddies in other mecha.
If you’ve seen some of Fujioka’s Medarot artwork, or the covers for the the AoZ books Volumes 2-6, you’ve probably got a sense of his character art style. It’s very cutesy, and immediately brings to mind Gaio/Peach Class of MegaMan Zero fame. The very beginning of the book looks almost like it was done much earlier than the rest of the book, as the illustrations are a bit simpler and the characters are extra cutesy.
too cute in the beginning, but it gets less so later on
After the first section the characters are less cutsey, but even so, still too cute for me. I’m a big fan of Gaio, but Fujioka doesn’t really have that same character art quality that he has in this book.
The mecha is a whole other story. This book was published in 2006, but I get the feeling it was started much earlier. Just as with his work over the course of Advance of Zeta, you can see an evolution in the quality and detail of the mechanical art. Some kind of mechanical goodness exists on almost every page of this 126 page manga. Like his AoZ, there’s an incredible amount of detail seen in most of the illustrations. There are also several pages of purely mechanical illustration profiling the Sunset Sparrow machine and its rivals. The designs themselves have sort of a steampunk quality. A mix of design elements from industrial age machines used on non-humanoid mecha designs.
cute characters, sweet mecha
As a big Fujioka fan, this book was definitely worth buying even though I can’t read and follow the story. I wasn’t sure if it would really have enough mecha goodness in it to make it worthwhile, but I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of mecha art that exists throughout the story. If you like the way Fujioka illustrates mecha, than you should just pick this up as a great mecha art book.