"How To Draw Manga" series.

[Straylight]

Anyone tried these guides before?

There's a shop in manchester city centre that sells "How to Draw". What are the good ones to start off with? I want to head down a mecha / cyberpunk style route. Also if you buy them in Japanese are they easy enough to follow?

[Heaven's Cloud]

I would suggest like Making An Anime(which is one of the books), or Mecha Design. Both are pretty good for what you are looking for.

[shooraijin]

I have a few in the series. The occult book notwithstanding (yikes!), they're very good model guides and have reasonably straightforward how-tos.

My major problem with them is that there is quite a bit of nudity in some of the guides, even the ones you wouldn't expect. The 'couples' book I just paperclipped a section totally shut because, frankly, it's stuff couples do that I really don't need to be drawing, and the 'battles' book has a whole subtopic on sailor suit catfights which is far too anatomically correct. (The 'bishoojo' book(s) are even worse, but at least you could gather that from the cover with several, um, impressive models.)

On the other hand, the 'battles' book has a huge array of poses and excellent discussion on how to make scenes look more realistic and powerful, the 'backgrounds and perspectives' book really goes into in-depth analysis and steps on many common scenarios and viewpoints, and the 'couples' book talks about dynamics between people in couples, even platonic ones like a brother and sister.

So, IMHO they *are* very well done and professionally produced, and I feel I got my money's worth out of the few that I own, but be aware of what's in them.