Yoshiyuki "Kill 'em All" Tomino is the mega-prolific creator of the Mobile Suit Gundam phenomenon, known, perhaps a little patronizingly, as the "Star Wars of Japan." He is really more of a C.S. Lewis of SF anime -- the inventor of an absurdly huge and detailed fictional world as coherent, obsessive and confidently executed as Narnia or even J.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth.
He is also the frustrated and impassioned artiste at the center of a multimillion-dollar global military-industrial complex of anime and toys.
Stone Bridge Press has re-released his original "Mobile Suit Gundam" trilogy of novels -- "Awakening," "Escalation" and "Confrontation" (first published in the United States in 1990) -- as a three-volume set, translated by manga/anime authority Frederik L. Schodt and introduced by super-otaku Gundam expert Mark Simmons, to sync with the steady rise in fame of the Gundam franchise in America.