Robotech Art 1, 2 & 3
(1986 / 1987 / 1988 - The Donning Company / Whitford Press) 
(Vol.1 by Kay Reynolds & Ardith Carlton) You would expect these volumes to hew closely to the common perception of an artbook, but Vol.1 might be thought of as losing its way, even though there's still enough art to keep it on the road. Little more than half of it is an episode guide to the three cycles that made up the animated Robotech saga at the time. Most of the synopses are pretty short, leaving lots of negative space to then be filled with one or more colorful reproductions of cel images from the particular episode. Even when only a larger single image is displayed, its size usually leaves something to be desired. More of these pages feature multiple images on them (some of them pretty small) and many of those that aren't headshots, or character portraits, captures a moment that's just inconsequential. Now then, a lot of the remainder of the book is a collection of drawn character sheets and mecha animation-guides (not unlike what a lot of pure manga celebrations entail). A lot of single images that might be interesting by themselves get lost in the morass of poses, costumes and facial expressions. At the end, there's a small section which serves to give an overview of how Japanese animation works were suffering in their translation to being American products at that time and how this country's presenters of Robotech held to a more mature standard (which would pave the way for a wave of exciting 'immigrants'). There are here a number of cel images from other anime works. So, all together, 169 of the book's 264 pages could said to be art-centric.
(edited by Kay Reynolds) Vol.2 is the real artbook of this trio, and scores significantly higher than the other two. It is 133 pages with 101 dominated by art, with 59 of those having a single large reproduction focused on (17 of those are large cel images from the show). Four double-page spreads are displayed with only one being a complete loser. The other pages are given over to photographs, paper-dolls, character-&-mecha-sheets. There is text about the success of ROBOTECH ART 1 and show itself, as well as some thumbnail artist biographies. The artists being 'well-presented' here are: Vyc Carolina & Joe Chacon, David A. Cherry, Colleen Doran (10), Leia Dowling, Jane Fancer, Dave Garcia, Michael Leeke, Edward Luena (3), Haruhiko Mikimoto, Lee Moyer (5), Bob Pinaha (with Tom Vincent), Doug Rice, Tim Sale, Studio Nue, Chris Tsuda (3), Colleen Winters, Yashikazu Yasuhiko, and Don Yee (3).
(by Carl Macek, published by Whitford Press) The 3rd volume is subtitled THE SENTINELS and the majority of the text relates the entire process of developing the so-named fourth cycle of the Robotech saga and how it fell apart, to be reformulated into a feature length product called Robotech II: The Sentinels. The story of Robotech, The Movie is also included here. It's hard to recommend this book for the art alone. While there's enough art that qualifies, most of it is in the form of a single static character figure-study isolated on a page, or a collection of mecha images. There are a number of pages that feature multiple cel images from what was produced before the series plug was pulled. A number of similar, but smaller, cel images are scattered sparsely through all the text. Also I feel, this book is bloated, with next to nothing on many of the pages with lots and lots of negative space.
other books of show-related art
Adventure Time - Eye Candy vol.1
Sexy Two - The Art Of Dirty Pair
other releases from The Donning Company
Frank Kelly Freas - The Art Of Science Fiction
Imagination - The Art & Technique Of David A. Cherry
The Fantasy Art Of Stephen Hickman
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