[Kamen Rider] Covers over 600 cyborgs in total! Release of Gakken "Kamen Rider Cyborg" decided!

“What if the monsters of Kamen Rider were seriously made into an educational encyclopedia?” “Gakken's Encyclopedia Kamen Rider 'Cyborg'” has surprisingly seriously given shape to such a seemingly somewhat reckless idea. Speaking of the “Gakken's Encyclopedia” series first published in 1970, many people must have enthusiastically turned the pages to look up animals, insects, dinosaurs, etc., in detail. However, what is observed in this book are the cyborgs created by evil organizations. If you thought, “It's just a collection of nostalgic characters, right?”, that's slightly incorrect. What makes this book interesting is that it doesn't treat cyborgs as mere villains, but studies them as a kind of “transcendent creature” that combines mechanical technology with the characteristics of plants and animals. If you look at them while thinking about why they have that appearance and why they have those abilities in places like the sky, underwater, forests, and grasslands, even the monsters you are used to seeing will look like different beings.

What will likely overwhelm you first upon opening the pages is its inclusion scale. It features approximately 600 cyborgs from the Showa era Kamen Rider series. This alone is a considerable amount of information, but the appeal is not just the large number. Because it is structured like an encyclopedia where you can look over the entirety rather than just introducing them one by one in order and finishing, new discoveries are born through comparison, such as “There were cyborgs with these characteristics too” or “There are surprisingly many of this type.” Furthermore, there are over 1,200 photos and illustrations, and being able to not only read the text but also carefully observe the modeling itself is a major point. While gazing at the head, body, weapons, and the organism that served as a motif, you will realize that various ingenuities were put into designs that, in your childhood, just ended with “scary” or “looks strong.”

What makes me personally feel “I see, this is an encyclopedia” is the perspective of classifying cyborgs by their adapting environment. By organizing them based on locations like “waterside,” “forest,” and “grassland,” the reasons for their respective abilities and physical structures become visible. For example, if acting underwater, what kind of abilities are necessary? If the forest is the main stage, what kind of physical characteristics are advantageous? When you think like that, the eccentric appearances of the monsters take on persuasiveness that it's not just a design, but “maybe this was the form for operating in this environment?”. Of course, they are fictional existences, but just being organized by the grammar of an educational encyclopedia makes them feel strangely realistic. This exquisite mix of seriousness and playfulness is precisely the fun unique to this book.

Waiting for those who are not satisfied with just the appearance are the newly drawn internal perspective views by Masato Hayase. “What on earth does the inside of Kamen Rider's body look like?” Anyone who has imagined such things in their childhood should be quite curious about this part. By expressing the mechanisms that cannot be seen from the outside through detailed depiction, reality as a machine is added to Kamen Rider, which was a fictional existence. Moreover, it's also interesting that when viewed as an adult, the places you pay attention to change from when you were a child. Once you start thinking, “With this structure, I can agree with that movement,” before you know it, you will have entered the world of Kamen Rider from a different direction than just appreciating the work.

What is even more interesting is the action commentary that breaks down and shows special moves and transformation movements. Since you can sequentially follow poses and body movements that pass by in an instant in the footage as diagrams, you can check details like “Oh, the arm was moved like this here.” Different from rewatching the footage many times, being able to compare a series of movements on the same page is unique to an encyclopedia. By adding the perspective of analyzing them as a single movement, rather than just enjoying transformations and special moves as “cool scenes,” another charm is born in familiar actions. The playfulness of this book is particularly well manifested in special features such as “Cyborgs near you,” “Let's compare,” “How to Kaizo (How to make a cyborg),” and “DANGER (The danger of cyborgs).” Just by looking at the titles, it's conveyed that the direction is different from a normal character book. Because it seriously applies the approaches familiar from educational encyclopedias to cyborgs, it's somewhat nostalgic yet the content is intense. This gap is truly fun, and you can either read it deeply as if examining materials, or casually read the pages that interest you.

For those who grew up with the Showa-era Kamen Riders, it will be a book where the nostalgic atmosphere of the encyclopedia itself stimulates memories. On the other hand, for the generation that doesn't know those days, it becomes a unique entry point not as “a book to memorize old monsters,” but as “a book to classify cyborgs and study their abilities and bodies.” The inclusion of about 600 cyborgs, over 1,200 photos and illustrations, classification by environment, internal structures, action analysis, and feature articles typical of an encyclopedia. When it is this thorough, it no longer fits within the words of just a reference book for fans. “If cyborgs really existed, how would they be featured in an encyclopedia?” What entertains you with such fantasies through pages full of information is “Gakken's Encyclopedia Kamen Rider 'Cyborg'.” Observe rather than read, study rather than gaze. It is a book that makes you want to delve into the world of Kamen Rider from a completely different angle than before.