Black Rock Shooter Visual Works

Title: Black Rock Shooter Visual Works
タイトル: Black Rock Shooter Visual Works
Pages: 28
Release Date: Summer 2009

Reading Time: 3 minutes

It would have been be hard to miss Huke’s meteoric rise onto the artist scene. His animation and illustrations for the BLACK★ROCK SHOOTER music video are extremely popular. Huke was around before that, but his appearances in magazines like Gelatin, and character design jobs like STEINS;GATE, have definitely increased since his association with the music and art circle Supercell.

So let’s start with a review of Huke’s Comiket 75 release BLACK★ROCK SHOOTER Visual Works. It’s essentially the printed version of the art from the BLACK★ROCK SHOOTER music video. If you like the art in the video, you’ll love this book.

One of the signature styles in BLACK★ROCK SHOOTER is the checkered floor and walls. It even appears with the stunning figure version of BLACK★ROCK SHOOTER. The video art work has a halftone pattern that does not appear in the book.

The use of dark colors, and limited color schemes on the pictures makes the dynamic flaming blue eye stand out even more. It’s great, too, that every image has a background, no matter how simple.

There are 28 pages in total, not including the covers, and the book is staple-bound. It’s landscape format, complementing the widescreen video format of the illustrations. Most of the art work fills the page. But some have tiled video frames that include the halftone pattern.

The end of the book includes concept design illustrations, so you can see how the BLACK★ROCK SHOOTER costume and weapons changed.

When you think about it, there’s not much to it, it’s a song and a video. But from that sprung a lot of merchandise from T-shirts and mugs, to figures to an anime Blu-Ray/DVD with the promise of a series. Maybe it’s that in the fluffy world of Vocaloids, Black Rock Shooter is the polar opposite!