Learning how to draw is also a matter of practicing a lot, but these manuals could contains some useful suggestions and clarify some points. So let's start :
Deleter Manga Techniques Vol.5 (80 pages) is a very good starting point for a newbie artist who want to know more about drawing manga styled stories. Despite being "volume 5", you don't need to own the previous books in order to understand this one as it works nicely as a standalone manual. What I really liked about this book is the quite unique (or at least rare, but of course Scott McCloud did it before and it became his trademark approch for Drawing Books) approach: the whole book lessons are showed in the form of a manga, featuring two characters (you can see them in the cover) learning themselves how to draw manga together: the guy seems to be slightly more expert and the girl is more than happy to ask him infos while she builds her own manga story.
At first I thought this approach could lead to not-serious explanations on techincal matters, instead the book surprised me on covering a wide range or drawing topics in a good way, and not making them boring, thanks to the comic characters.
It starts with drawing basis (the same ones you'll fine in many other manuals): human figure proportions, perspective, placing characters into a 3D space and such, and then dives into the basis of making a manga comic; the size of the page, the "cage" for the page layout, then the various steps: from the storyboard to the penciling, to inking and screentoning, everything is covered giving useful infos on materials and specs for page sies and so on. From this book for exmaple I learned the names of the various inking pen nibs, so I could order them :) If you're wondering, when I ink with pen nibs, I most often use G-Pen nibs: very elastic and allowing a good range of differently sized lines, from thin to thick, without problems. Usually inking like this needs some practice but it really gives satisfying results :)
If I can find a critic to make to this book, is the fact it can cover enough each topic, due to the wide amount of topics listed: if you are already used to perspective and proprtions stuff, you won't find much help from the complete but quick lessons on the book. So it's really a wonderful book for beginners: very complete and absolutely not boring, a well crafted idea; here, after many years owning the book, I decided to give it to a friend who wanted to learn more about drawing manga. It seems she liked it and found it very helpful, so I confirm my impressions on it.
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