Mika Akitaka Mobile Suit Girl Art Works

Title: Mika Akitaka Mobile Suit Girl Art Works
タイトル: MOBILE SUIT GIRL 明貴美加MS少女アートワークス
Pages: 96
Release date: 03/24/2010

Reading Time: 3 minutes

My first impressions of Mika Akitaka Mobile Suit Girl Art Works are good. It had a whole lot more art work than I had expected! I was bracing myself for more sketches and process pages based on the contents of the first art book. Full disclosure, there aren’t any!

Mika Akitaka MS Girl Art Works is 96 pages and features a total of 66 different MS Gundam Girls. There is a double-sided fold-out poster with the cover art work on one side, and Unicorn Gundam on the other.

Unlike a lot of artists these days, Akitaka Mika still works directly with hand-drawn pencil line arts, and then colors his characters digitally. As a result, the black outlines look rough and sketch-like. The book binding is glue-bound with no overlap. A few of the spreads look quite cut off.

The art book divides into four sections titled “Character Side” , “Gundam ACE” , “FIX CAFE” , and “Kyoushiro MANIAX“. “Character Side” includes illustrations from the magazine Character Model (キャラクターモデル). The “Gundam ACE” section features illustrations that ran in that magazine from 2004 to 2010.

The “FIX CAFE” Gundam girls blend waitresses with Gundams, and this was also a feature that ran in Gundam ACE magazine. The addition of skirts and other clothing items looks outside of Akitaka Mika’s usual style, but it still works aesthetically. The “Kyoushiro Maniax” section only has four Gundam Girls, but I really don’t recognize the designs for these.

Mika Akitaka Mobile Suit Girl Art Works finishes with artist comments on all of the illustrations, along with a Q&A session on specific art works with regards to ideas and inspirations. The adaptation that goes into Akitaka Mika’s designs making each Gundam recognizable, but still believable as suits, makes for a nice collection of illustrations 16 years after his first book came out.