D. Gray-man Illustrations NOCHE

Reading Time: 4 minutes

D. Gray-man Illustrations NOCHE came out at the beginning of February this year and marks the first illustration collection for this 6-year old series. This art book features art by Hoshino Katsura, with 86 pages of color illustrations from issues of Weekly Shounen Jump and Jump Square.

One of the most novel things about this art book is the presentation. The art book is inside a cardboard slip-case featuring the title art work, the bar code, price, and other such information. But remove the slip-case and you see the real cover, with black sketches on a bright magenta backdrop. The slip-case isn’t as tall as the A4 sized art book. You can see the author’s name when the cover is fully on. The publishers have added that extra presentation value, and yet kept the price down to just ￥1890.

D. Gray-man Illustrations NOCHE includes a double-sided fold-out poster with new art work. One side is the cover art featuring Lenalee, Allen, Kanda, and Lavi on a black background. The other side features Kanda, Lavi and Allen in a flat coloring style that isn’t typical of the manga art.

The art work is by time period, with the beginning of the book featuring art works from 2004 to 2006 and the latter half featuring art works from 2007 to 2010. But within the subsections, the illustration arrangement is random.

Of course, even Hoshino Katsura’s older works are lovely. I remember seeing the illustration above featuring Lenalee and Road years ago when I didn’t even know what D. Gray-man was.

Even though I appreciate the older stuff, I was really looking forward to seeing a lot of the newer volume cover illustrations. And that’s definitely what you get in this art book: Large full page illustrations and text-free spreads.

There are about 75 illustrations, though it’s hard to tally up more accurately due to two pages of small illustrations of Allen Walker (mostly) and others in a variety of outfits titled “Party Mix.”

There are some pictures of the Noahs in the latter half of the book, though I do wish there were even more. You can really see a gradual increase in the use of bright colors in Hoshino Katsura’s illustrations as time went on. Also in the back of the art book are two illustrations from her first manga, Continue.

I mentioned earlier that D. Gray-man Illustrations NOCHE is 86-pages of color illustrations, but the book itself is 102 pages. The last 16 pages are monochrome pages with a few pages of illustrations, a commented index, and cross talks with Hoshino Katsura, Death Note‘s Obata Takeshi and Akimoto Osamu. This really is a comprehensive art book for D. Gray-man, covering so many years of illustrations in such high quality. Factor in the low price of ￥1890 and it’s a must get for fellow D. Gray-man fans out there!