The Worldwide Merchandise Division 2001 of Les MS Girls

 

"Pert young girls in sailor outfits run around firing bazookas" …. The absurdity of this scenario is enough to cause a chuckle with almost anyone. Nevertheless, this combination of "girls＆hardware" was incredibly popular with Japanese animation fans during the 1980s. This phenomenon was also no doubt the spark which ultimately gave birth to the MS Girls. The MS Girls concept itself is also more than a little off the wall. It features cute, seemingly helpless, prepubescent girls wearing body armour which is redesigned versions of the various humanoid battle machines which appear in the Mobile Suit Gundam very 1980s indeed. 

This concept itself has been around for more than 10 years and it is not clear who first started drawing such series characters. Even if it were clear, as the idea is a parody of the Gundam universe, it would be difficult to call the artist's work "original. " In that sense, Mika Akitaka is simply one of the many who have drawn MS Girls. 

Nevertheless, his drawings are generally considered the originals, or standard-setters for two reasons：First, he participated in an official capacity on the original Mobile Suit Gundam series as a mechanical designer. Second, his MS Girls have appeared in a number of commercial publications for nearly ten years now his persistence lends credence to his work. Despite the length of time that he has worked on the genre, a careful count of his works reveals that he has, unfortunately, less than 70 drawings completed as of May 1994. This book is a collection of his works to date. It may serve as one of the final chapters to the "games" of the 1980s.