Go Nagai- A pictorial retrospective on his first 30 years of art!
39Getting into Mazinger Z as a kid was a transformative experience. Between that and Robotech at such an early age both were major reasons for the anime and manga aesthetic getting cemented in my head.
Go Nagai was everything teenage me loved about comics. Everything was larger than life and over the top. Stories would continue to escalate themselves into world (or even universe) spanning apocalyptic events and ultimate battles between good and evil.
This book was a major help to me in the days where you couldn't necessarily use foreign language fonts without shelling out for third party software (or using a foreign manufactured computer).
I studied it religiously prior to ever visiting Japan, and spent many a warm summer afternoon combing the book stores of whichever locale I was currently visiting.
I ended up acquiring so many books on my first trip I had no way to bring them all home, and ended up sending boxes of books by boat. It took months upon months to arrive, but it was a pretty ridiculous haul.
This book is a visual reminder of those heady days of discovering all this stuff on your own, without the internet to guide you.
I'm curious as to if there's been an updated version of this type of book. I know in just the past 20 years since this book's publication there has been an absolute deluge of new and updated works by the artist.
That's some serious dedication to your craft!