Macross Armor 7 Manga

[sketchley]

Manga history: the manga was created in an attempt to break into the North American comic industry. It was sent to Academy Comics, at exactly the time that they lost the Robotech license.

As the manga was written for inclusion into the Robotech comic universe, there are some aspects of that universe that are reflected in the story. As this is a “quick and dirty†scan & post, I’m not modifying it in any way aside from adding my e-mail address to it.

It was drawn during November and December of 1996.

At the time, I only had access to Macross line art from the Robotech Art books, the Palladium RPG books, and the TIA:DYRL? book. I'm somewhat amused that despite the manga being created for the Robotech universe, the mecha designs that were used fit extremely well into the image that Shouji Kawamori has stated about the post SWI era of Macross (DYRL designs, SDF:M story.)

Specs:

Various sized Rotring Isograph pens loaded with Rapid Graph Ultradraw (Black India) ink

Letter sized laser printer paper*

*Not the best stuff in the world to be doing inking on. Nevertheless, there were few to no smudges from the ink on it.

After a decade of not having looked at it, I quite like the character developments in the first few pages. The last half becomes a bit choppy, and uneven. If I were to redraw it, I’d give more page space per panel in the action scenes, and there wouldn’t be as many close-ups of the enemy mecha. Nevertheless, I feel that it captures some of the energy of the combat scenes in Macross.

Excuse my bad printing. One nice thing about doing manga digitally is not having to print and hand draw word balloons on the manga. Alas, this was created before the digital age.

EDIT: Where did the manga go? Here:

http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/54317980/

http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/54318157/

http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/54318303/

http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/54318453/

http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/54318548/

http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/54318766/

http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/54318920/

http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/54319175/

Edited August 10, 2007 by sketchley

[MechTech]

Great work! Some can draw, some can't (I'm in the can't category outside a PC). - MT

[grapetang]

Nice! I like the mechs!

[Vinnie]

Dang dude! I'm impressed doing manga by hand without computer aided graphics is no easy feat. You also did a hell of a job with all the different mecha and spacecraft. My hat's off to you!

Any plans to continue or do something else in the Macross realm?

[sketchley]

Thank you.

I have no plans. It was a one off gig. I do, however, write an ongoing play-by-post RPG game set in the Macross universe (see the link in my signature.)