This review was originally written for JPQueen.com.

I suppose I should've taken the title of this book more literally. It's mostly full of b&w sketches from the manga, thus the lower rating. I prefer lots of color images in my artbooks. Here's an overall description of what can be found in this book:

The size is a little larger than 7x8. It has 109 pages and only 10 of them (5 front & back) are in color. Most of them are of Tsuzuki, but a couple also have Tatsumi and Hisoka in them. The next 12 pages are b&w and seem to focus on minor characters from various parts of the manga series. All of the illustrations in this section come directly from the manga. The following 46 pages are the actual sketch book with very sketchy illustrations of Asato Tsuzuki (11pgs), Hisoka Kurosaki (8pgs), Kazutaka Muraki (4pgs), Other People (mostly from the agency) (8pgs), One Scene (various group sketches) (15pgs). The following section has 19 pgs and appears to be the making of 9 different layouts from the manga series. The final 21 pages are a mini-manga that seems unrelated to Yami no Matsuei, but since I can't read Japanese it's hard to tell. The very final image is an adorable b&w finished drawing of a young boy and his dog. Very cute! ( )