Let's Draw Manga: All About Fighting (Let's Draw Manga)

Rating:
Summary: This book is GREAT!
Review: This book is wonderful! Like all the other let's draw manga books, "All About Fighting" covers everything within its topic and much more. This book has every fighting style from fistfights to virtual reality battles. My favorite part of this book is the character design part, which shows tricks to designing characters, and also shows different kinds of characters and their traits.

Some things included in this book are, costumes and uniforms involved in fighting, various poses involved in different fighting styles, a mini weapons encyclopedia, and short mangas (comics) with almost every fighting style to help interpret the use(s) of the style. Overall, "Let's Draw Manga: All About Fighting" is an excellent source of reference and inspiration.

I think this book is a must buy for artists who want to pursue a job in manga making or if you just want to learn to draw a totally awesome fight scene. It substitutes having to take lessons from a teacher (even though I highly doubt you'll find one), and when it comes to what you can to do with this book, the possibilities are practically limitless! I would recommend this book to anyone who would be willing to listen.

Rating:
Summary: A Valuable Information Resource!
Review: This is an excellent book that has a wealth of detail, drawings, and information related to various kinds of combat in manga. There are sections on unarmed combat, armed combat, uniforms and costume design (as it relates to combat), supernatural (ala DBZ) combat, monster combat, robot combat, and even animal combat!

There are a number of short 2-6 page manga that illustrate various points, and are decent examples of composition. Where this book really shines, though, is in the "Weaponless Fighting" and "Weapon Fighting" sections. There are a wide variety of techniques from various styles of fighting presented, and each section also includes a brief guide to designing characters for action manga.

The book's only shortcoming is that it rarely shows more than one or two views of a particular attack type, but given the scope of the book, that's understandable.

I highly recommend that beginning to advanced artists interested in the manga style acquire this book. For beginners it gives good information on techniques and tricks, and for advanced artists it provides a wealth of reference material.