Yesterday I received
Carmine, the latest artbook of
Sadamoto Yoshiyuki.
When was announced, I decided to not purchase it because was way too expensive (13,000 yen) for the little extras that offered: an outer case; a cd with the pics of the book; 2 posters of
Rei and
Asuka;
2 reprint pictures and Sadamoto’s talks with
Hosoda Mamoru (director of
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and
Summer Wars),
Tsurumaki Kazuya (director of
FLCL and
Top Wo Nerae 2)
and Anno Hideaki (director of
Evangelion).
When I read in
EvaGeeks that this limited edition included the contents from
the previously released artbooks of
Sadamoto, I hurried to order it on
Amazon.co.jp.
To afford that step price, I canceled my preorders on
Rei & Asuka Maid version by Kotobukiya (;_;) but the worst of it is that
Carmine doesn't contains his previous artbooks and was just a misunderstanding from EvaGeeks people...
It was odd that the official page didn't said anything about
any compilation, but when I read that info I taked it as true because that would explain that extremely pricey tag...
The book itself is nice. Is the 3rd atrbook by
Sadamoto and 10 years had passed since the last one was released.
The first one was called
Alpha, was released in 1993 and was focused in his main work at the moment,
Fushigi no Umi no Nadia. Also it was my first purchase on-line.
The second one was
Der Mond, released just in the popularity peak of
Shin Seiki Evangelion, in 1999.
This book contains his main illustrations for
Evangelion (mostly the DVDs covers and the color pages from the manga from volume 5 onwards), the promotional material for
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and
Summer Wars, the covers for the
.hack games (both the first series and G.U.) and his works for the rest of Gainax productions (
FLCL,
Top Wo Nerae 2 and just 2 pics for
Fushigi no Umi no Nadia). There's a total of 102 pictures.
Since the artbook came with a CD with the pics, I can upload some of it without taking crappy photos.
I'm happy with the artbook because
Sadamoto is my favorite character designer since 1993, but the problem with the book are the "extra" contents. Let's see:
-Hard cover and outer case. Pointless addition. And since I have space problems both here and in Spain, I rather prefer a softcover version...
- 30 pages of
Sadamoto’s talks. Again pretty much pointless, since I'm buying an artbook and not a magazine. More useless if you don't even understand Japanese
-
2 reprint pictures. Sounds cool, but are just 2 illustrations from the book printed on card stock. Again, pointless.
-A cd containing the pics of the book. More useful than the previous ones.
-2 posters of
Rei and
Asuka. This is the best extra, but even with it, it doesn't explain the over-priced set. I can't take pictures of them because I want to keep sealed until my arrival at Spain (to make sure that they don't bend during the trip) so I put a pic taken from
Eva Kinkyuu News blog:
Carmine will be released as a "normal edition" later this year for about 3,000 yen, so I can't recommend this "limited edition" even if you are a hardcore collector like me, because 10,000 yen are wasted...
As I said when I received the previous issue, the extra included in this one is an original Fate/Zero clock drawn by Takeuchi featuring Saber, Irisviel and Illya, all wearing Iri's dress.
Rei "betraying" Gendou.
Rei "betraying" Gendou.
