[REVieW] Tsubasa ILLuSTRaTION CHRoNiCLE
Tsubasa Illustration Chronicle was released a few days ago in Japan, on December 2d.
It was presented as a 'mini artbook', with exact the same dimensions as the manga volumes and 68 pages.
It doesn't have a dust cover and the only new artwork is the cover of the book.
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Well, my opinion is simple and clear: I do not consider this as an artbook per se, but more like as a complement to the manga volumes > as you know,the tankubons do not have any color pages inside, so I think of this book as an extra volume with all the illustrations we would have liked to see inside the manga.
And as such, it's pretty nice to own, I'm really happy to own it :)
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The TWC illustrations inside are:
-3 covers of the manga volumes
-2 covers of the bluray included in the special edition of vol 1 & 2
-1 cover of the case of the PlayButton included in the special edition of vol 3
-4 covers of the Shounen Magazine Special issues in which TWC was published
-1 illustration of a clearfile given as a gift with an issue of shounen magazine special
-12 color splashes for the chapters themselves.
For a total of 23 illustrations of the Tsubasa World Chronicle series, as announced.
Now, what is to say about the illustrations from TRC?
Pretty much nothing, to be honest... They chose random artworks from the TRC series: some are covers from the Deluxe edition, some are covers from the regular edition, some are color pages from the chapters etc... all in all, those are all known pictures that were already all compiled in the 2 artbooks released years ago.
What actually pleased me, surprisingly, were the black and white chibis we got in the very last pages: chibis of the characters as waiters, original drawings of chibis used to make keychains/photo frame which were sold last year, and the little chibis that are actually the cover of a tumbler that could be won if you participated to a game included in one of the shounen magazine special.