Hirofumi Ichikawa

Years of ~~clean living~~ doing freelance work for Takara can have you looking like this.

Hirofumi Ichikawa (市川裕文 Ichikawa Hirofumi) is a Japanese illustrator and toy designer. He's a noted Transformers fan who has made the jump to working on the brand in an official capacity for Takara.

As a fan, he wrote numerous fan-comics and magazines (called dōjinshi in Japan), mainly focusing on introducing Japanese fans to the Hasbro/American version of Transformers and the concepts and characters within. Among them was a very indignant magazine decrying the "funny" dub of Beast Wars that was presented in Japan, as it had removed much of the "serious sci-fi" edge that had made the show immensely popular with the English-speaking fanbase. But perhaps his most well known pre-official work is Transformers Chronicles, a sort of "bridge" story for his take on the lead-up to Generation 2. This book was translated to English, but has long since sold through its short run.

Ichikawa's art style is heavily toy-based; his Transformers almost always have the toy's proportions and detailing down exactly, not approximations or "influenced" altered cartoon models. The only changes made are there to make them more "realistic" by adding in joints for motion that the toys may lack. These joints are always very realistic in terms of mechanical detailing of the pistons and rotating joints necessary for real-life machines, similar to the mechanical detailing artist E. J. Su employs. His style can best be summed up as "if the toys were real robots". He is a long-time fan; Ichikawa was drawing toy-based artwork long before it got "popular" with the explosion of Dreamwave onto the fandom.

Ichikawa has a definite preference for the Western take of Transformers, enjoying its more sci-fi-oriented and older-aimed feel, though he eschews the more metaphysical/mystical aspects of the fiction, especially Primus.

Outside of Transformers he's worked as a translator for western comics, as well as writing, illustrating, and coloring X-Men: The Manga. He also created promotional art for the Capcom game Marvel Super Heroes on the magazine Comic Gamest, as well as publishing his original story Boldor The Invincible Neighbour on Bandai's sci-fi magazine Cyber Comix. As he stopped collaborating with Transformers in a toy design capacity he has since focused more on his original comics such as Boldor and Rainfall.

Writer/illustrator

Pioneer LaserDisc and DVD pack-in booklets
- Fight! Super Robot Lifeform Transformers Box 1 and 2
- Fight! Super Robot Lifeform Transformers 2010
"Linkage"
e-HOBBY toy bios
"Story of Binaltech"
- "Outlier" (Story and Art)
Transformers Collection box illustrations
- Commemorative Series (reused from Transformers Collection)
"Beast Wars Reborn"
Alternity (Power Plans, bios, stories, illustrations)
- "Arch-Nemesis!", "To Die Game!" (lineart)
"Beast Wars Universe" (co-written with Fumihiko Akiyama)
Cybertronian: The Unofficial Transformers Recognition Guide Volume 5 (front cover)
"World of the Transformers" (information database/website)
BotCon Japan 1997 commemorative T-shirt design
Several entries of the Facebook version of Ask Vector Prime
The Transformers Classics Vol. 2 (Japanese reprint cover)

Toy designer

With the beginning of Energon, Ichikawa was given the job of "mech design", taking the engineering designs of many toys and finalizing the aesthetic details, sculpts, etc. The toys he has worked on include...