Review: Shimada Humikane Art Works
This review is a horrible idea because it will probably brand me as a pedophile for the rest of my life, but I cannot help but love Shimada Humikane. I’ve been following his stuff since early 2004 right before the moe tidal wave broke, and finally with the advent of Strike Witches coming out, he at long last has his own artbook. I have to admit that since I only buy artbooks done by guys that I really love (ABe, Okama, Nihei Tsutomu, basically everything that triples in price a year after it gets released) I am apt to give gushing reviews of basically any artbook I own, but “cool indifference” or “critical distance” are phrases unknown to the brave new blogosphere!
Anyway, the book is fairly evenly split down the middle between Strike Witches-related images and non-SW related stuff, which consists of some licensed works but mostly original works. There aren’t really many new images in here, but there’s an interview and a “how I draw this heavily-armed girl wearing panties” how-to photoshop section to be read if you can decipher moon runes. It’s printed on big ol’ A3 pages and the illustrations all stand up to being both large and professionally printed, shockingly enough. The SW stuff is split between promo art (magazine covers, etc) and other official art (eyecatches, character design sheets, chichikurabe), and the non-SW part of it is either “official fanwork”-ish stuff (Rider?? but her breasts are so large!!) and doujin/hp illusts. Of course, all the artwork for the Mechamusume figure series is found in here, so plenty of girls who are presumably not embarrassed by their not panties for you guys out there into that kind of stuff.
I have some poorly-taken digital camera pictures of the book, which in a perfect world would make you want to go out there and give Humikane-san your money, but 1) anime fans don’t spend money and 2) joke’s on you, this shit sold out in less than half a week! I am assuming that Kadokawa will do another printing, since the companies seem to have slowly realized that creating more supply to meet demand = more money, so when they do, make sure to throw your money at them! akibablog also has better pictures than I do, so make sure to click those too!
