Majestic Manga Masterpieces: A Gallery of Recent Cover Illustrations
As a creative professional one of my favorite forms of inspiration is to visit Japanese bookstores and look through the most recent manga and magazine covers. Unlike the United States there is still a strong market for illustration — and even better yet the variety of styles that you see is just amazing. So I’ve put together a gallery of covers that have caught my eye over the last few months to share these gems. Shown above is the cover for Gee Not which started life as a web comic. I love how the main character and her cats are surrounded by a colorful variety of colorful pachinko machines — another nice touch is how the typography is boxing her in as well. Below is the cover for Ctrl + T which is a book cover for a collection of manga by several artists:
Monkey Business is a literary magazine — I really love the powerful combination of hot pink, lime green and yellow on this cover:
These two covers are by Sudou Masumi and contain collections of self selected stories from Beam Comix. I really love the subtle watercolors that are used with these two illustrations. I also love how human characters are interacting with wildlife — you have a little girl clutching an oversized lizard on one cover and an old man escaping an octopus arm on the next cover:
This is a cover for Young Animal magazine. I love how powerful the facial expression is on this character from the comic Detroit Rock City:
These are the covers to the books Detroit Not Good Circus and They Had Previously Imagined Going to Norazu! In both cases I love how these drawings are very Japanese, yet not what you typically expect to see in terms of manga illustration:
Gelatin is a quarterly manga publication — the two characters on this cover have a real otherworldly quality to them:
The stylized distortion of the the fist and feet on these two covers of Break Once Built are quite powerful. One of the things that makes the artwork so strong is the use of negative space that surrounds the character — something which you don’t see often enough in American comic book covers:
This last cover is a bit of a cheat — Euro Manga is a publication which covers the world of European comic books. My favorite little touch in this illustration is the wedding photo in the lower right corner which adds to the shock of the lady with blond hair:
