Men Who Created Gundam

In 1978 animation director Yoshiyuki Tomino set forth to change the Japanese animation industry. For decades prior, Japanese science fiction had churned out numerous tales of semi-autonomous robots that would often come to the aide of humanity, but as someone who worked on a number of those works, Tomino came to the realization that he wanted to see a more realistic robot narrative. His vision was one where the robot while just slightly more human in appearance, was utilized more as a tool manipulated by man. With renowned artist Yoshikazu Yasuhiko by his side, and occasionally as his artistic rival, Tomino would change the way the whole world came to see Japanese animation and the broader toy and comics industries built around it. This evolution would be a war in its own right! Battles were fought in the offices of the animation studio! Conflicts were equally as heated in the recording booth!

Requiring no prior experience with anime or mecha or Gundam...full of thrills and spills and lucky breaks and narrow escapes and preening villains you'll love to hate and pigheaded heroes you may hate to love, and expert drawings by a master craftsman, and hard, sturdy violence. - Joe McCulloch, The Comics Journal on Gundam

Born in 1969, Hideki Ohwada is a beloved comedic manga creator. Best known in the West for his long-running mahjong political parody The Legend of Koizumi, Ohwada actually made his debut in 1999 on the baseball comedy Fun Koshien. Since then he has contributed in nearly two dozen series, mostly for Kadokawa Publishing. While Ohwada may be best known for his sensational genre work in the West, he is respected across Asia for his passion for the Gundam franchise. Ohwada has been working within the world of Gundam continuously since 2009 and has created a number of works that have seen multi-media adaptations.