The Energon Pub

soem of you probably allready know about this book but for the others that do not know about it.
this has been for out for 4-5 months now i saw it at fye supercenter store and it has every transformer from generation 1 to season 4 even the movie charcters i give it 5 out 10.

front and back cover is in color but all the pages inside the book are in black and white some of the tansformations soundwave, megatron, are hard to see need a maginfying glass to see some of there transformations it could have included bios and there tech specs for each character would make it better but it doesnt have that some little descriptions here and there for some characters like unicron, humans, and others if your a fan of the series 1- to the very last series i recomend buy.

its well worth a purchase, for the RRP, but not much more than that.

Very thick and heavy book, with the animation models of all the characters in a quasi order of appearance (which season they appeared in, not as they appeared in the actual season itself).

Because the models are the animation models they are lacking detail in comparison to other art from the G1 era.

Still a great pick up, good for scanning and re-colouring them yourself too.

I want a TF book!

It doesn't have all characters from the series and it could do with a few more explanation.

The biggest thing I'm missing are the color kexs to the characters, the cartoon wasn't black and white afterall.
The line arts by themselves are nice, but there should be some indication towards the color of the characters.

Sarri wrote:It doesn't have all characters from the series and it could do with a few more explanation.

The biggest thing I'm missing are the color kexs to the characters, the cartoon wasn't black and white afterall.
The line arts by themselves are nice, but there should be some indication towards the color of the characters.

I think the line art works best in this style, seeing as it is a art guide, not a colour guide.

What exactly needs explaining?

A friend bought this book for me and I absolutely love it. As an animation student I absolutely live for stuff like this. It's very helpful as an art reference guide and I use it a lot when drawing Transformers or making up my own concepts. There's even a page where there's nothing but autobot and decepticon symbols drawn from just about every angle.

It's also fun to just look through. It has almost all of the characters (I know it's missing Elita-1, Firestar, Chromia, and Moonracer) and even includes things like size comparisons for several characters, alternate designs, characters that never made it onto the show, etc. Very, very cool book.

It is a thick but simple back and white book. It is an interesting one to look at.

i_amtrunks wrote:I think the line art works best in this style, seeing as it is a art guide, not a colour guide.

What exactly needs explaining?

Exactly, it wants to be an Art Guide and Art Guide to colored characters, not to black and white characters.

Having the book completely in color would defeat the purpose, but having no color at all equally defeats the purpose of "A complete compendium of character designs". The color is as much a part of the character design as the line art.
Take the seekers as an example. Thundercracker, Skywarp and Starscream share the same line art, their design difference is in the color, something not reflected in "The Ark" at all.

Any sample scans?

IDW's homepage
Just scroll down.

Brawn's robot mode is totally different from the alt mode.