FLCLISM++ – artbooks.me

Reading Time: 4 minutes

FLCLISM++ is a stylistic compilation featuring much of the FLCL art work we’ve seen over the years, including magazine illustrations, character designs, and inspiration photos. It’s a re-make of an earlier book, FLCLSM, and without having seen the earlier version, I would guess there is more content.

FLCLISM++ is a small B5-sized book, which is about the height of the average volume of manga. It’s square shaped and doesn’t have a slip cover, but the actual cover folds out. The front cover illustration can be seen on the inside back cover fold-out, while the inside front cover fold-out has the line art illustration above.

The first 14 pages of the art section start out with photographs and a couple of background illustrations. I was not a fan of the photos of television screens, which include the scan lines present on older CRT screens. I can see it looking cool digitally, but it looks really bad in print.

Starting on page 17 are the kind of illustrations you would expect from an FLCL art book. There isn’t a lot of new work aside from the Blu-RAY box art, but it gathers a lot of illustrations from a variety of out-of-print sources.

All twelve of the DVD jackets and poster illustrations are included, though several of them were also in the recent Yoshiyuki Sadamoto CARMINE art book with a much better presentation. A good portion of the illustrations can be found in CARMINE, since Yoshiyuki Sadamoto did so much of the FLCL art. The ones that haven’t been published in many places are those by animators like Tadashi Hiramatsu, Yoh Yoshinari, and Kazuya Tsurumaki.

One thing I noticed was that some of the illustrations were cropped in such a way that they were missing large parts of the pictures. Above is the Haruko illustration from the art book next to the original publication in the Newtype February 2000 issue. While the most important parts of the picture are included, I don’t see why they couldn’t have arranged it differently to included the whole thing as they did with illustrations earlier in the book.

The illustration section runs from pages 17 through 77, with six pages of photographs and background arts mixed into that. It’s a good amount of illustrations, and certainly more than I thought would be in FLCLISM++. Fifteen of those illustrations are monochrome works. I guess the real let down for the art works was how small they were published, often with white borders on an already small page.

The “Text” section of the book has sketches and concept designs mixed into the interviews. This section makes up the rest of the art book, from pages 78 through 157, with the last two pages making up the illustration index. Some of the staff interviews in the “Text” section include Yoji Enokido, Kazuya Tsurumaki, Hiroyuki Imaishi, and Harumi Takahoshi.

I personally don’t feel FLCLISM++ was worth its ￥2200 price tag, especially when compared to other recent art book releases. It almost feels like too little too late when you consider most of these illustrations were better presented in other art books released earlier this past year, with Yoshiyuki Sadamoto’s CARMINE and Kazuhiro Takamura’s ANIMATION WORKS.

*My 2020 addendum, “My tastes have really changed, I love this little book.”