UPDATE:

The MECH anthology was a huge success on Kickstarter, and the funding was acheived to not only publish the book, but also to include that gorgeous art from Frankie B. Washington pictured below. I’m pretty sure the release will be around Jan 2017. Look for it then, and I’ll be promoting it when it’s out.

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I came to a love of Mechs and Giant Robots in an unusual way. There were two parts to it. The first was in the late 1970s as a child, when I got one of the two-foot tall Shogun Warriors toys. You might know him as Great Mazinger, but in the toy line, this plastic behemoth was simply ‘Mazinga.’ And he was glorious. Spring loaded rockets in his fist (more on this in a bit), a wobbly plastic sword in one hand, spare rockets clipped onto his shoulders, and—because it was the spectacular 70s, and probably also because Disco was murdering our earholes—Mazinga had roller skates built into his feet. That’s right. Roller skates. Simply put, it was the coolest and most alien toy I had ever seen. And this was 1979 in New York, well after the initial onslaught of Star Wars toys. Star Wars was literally alien, but I had at least been familiar with the film (which I saw at a drive-in at the age of six). When it came to Mazinga, Raydeen, and Dragun—the first few Shogun Warriors—I had no context, and no understanding of Japan or the Japanese culture that had spawned them. I did recognize the fourth Shogun Warrior release at that size, though: Godzilla films had been on TV Saturday afternoons my whole life.

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