"Battle Cry: The Art of Samurai Champloo" Book
It came in the mail today. The original seller on eBay canceled transaction after finding out they didn't have the book in stock after all, so I had to locate a copy on amazon.com (This is the first time I shopped there in like... four years.). Well, it came pretty quickly (despite the free shipping), so I was happy about that. It cheered me up a little.
It's a nice heavy hard cover book (Cover design is beautiful!) with high quality heavy paper with good color printing and nice binding. (This was something I couldn't really tell from the book review with the video clip, as good as that review was.) The first half of the book is full color production artwork of backgrounds, main characters, and other characters. Many of the character artwork are the same ones featured in the "Roman Album", but the beautiful background images are something worth paying attention to in this book. Just like alukahnicapot mentioned before, some are truly breathtaking. What I found fun was the scribbles on the final reference sketches of the characters in Japanese. It's also a great reference for some of us who like to meddle with fan art or doodles of our favorite characters.
The second half of the book is the black and white line art, and again, it is divided into backgrounds, main characters, and the other characters. Things like shading specifications on characters are shown. And some more very detailed background sketches. I really enjoyed looking at those. It reminded me of the trip I made back in middle school to the "movie village" sets for the historical dramas. This is an art book and the only text I found was the introduction by the character designer of the Boondocks series and the rehash of the three main characters from the "Roman Album". The rest of the text are the pencil scribbles by production staff in Japanese.
Even though this book doesn't offer as extensive an information as the "Roman Album" did, it sure cheered me up on a bad day. So I'm glad I got a copy of this for me. :D