『荒木飛呂彦』

Hirohiko Araki(荒木 飛呂彦, Araki Hirohiko, born June 7, 1960), pseudonym of Toshiyuki Araki(荒木 利之, Araki Toshiyuki), is a Japanese manga artist.

He is best known for his long-running series JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, which began publication in Weekly Shōnen Jump in 1987 and has over 120 million copies in circulation, making it one of the best-selling manga series in history.

Biography

Early life

Araki grew up in Sendai, Japan with his parents and younger identical twin sisters.

He cites his sisters' annoyances as the reason he spent time alone in his room reading manga, naming Ai to Makoto as the most important one to him.

He supposes that his father's art books were his motive for drawing manga;he was particularly influenced by the work of French artist Paul Gauguin.

After a school friend praised his manga, he began secretly drawing manga behind his parents' backs.

He submitted his first work to a magazine in his first year of high school.

All his submissions were rejected while other artists his age or younger were making successful debuts.

He decided to go to the publishers' offices in Tokyo in person to find out why, taking a manga, Poker Under Arms, that he stayed up all-night to finish.

The Shueisha editor he met highly criticized the work, but said it had potential and to clean it up for the upcoming Tezuka Awards.