Riichiro Inagaki
Biography. Born on June 20, 1976, in Tokyo, Inagaki started to like manga when he read Fujiko Fujio's "Manga Michi" in middle school. In 1994, he competed at the third Manga Kōshien, a high school manga contest based in Kōchi Prefecture. As it only demanded a one-panel story, Inagaki just threw some ink on the paper to look like he had messed up the story. He said, "People really liked that for some reason. But Manga Koshien isn't something I'm so fond of remembering". After finishing school, he enrolled in a manga and film  production company as animation assistant. He started his career as professional manga writer by publishing works in Shogakukan's "Big Comic Spirits". He debuted in October 2001 with "Nandodemo Roku Gatsu Jū San Hi", and also wrote for the magazine "Square Freeze" and "Love Love Santa", published in November 2001 and in February 2002 respectively. He later moved to Shueisha's "Weekly Shōnen Jump", in which he won the 7th "Story King" award for a storyboard of "Eyeshield 21". When he planned to create "Eyeshield 21", the editorial department asked if he wanted to both write and draw the series , but Inagaki felt he was "so rookie". So he asked Yusuke Murata to be the illustrator. In 2002, they published two one-shots called and on March 5 and 12 in "Weekly Shōnen Jump". The series began to be regularly published on July 23 of the same year in the same magazine, and spanned 333 chapters, the last one being published on June 15, 2009. Collected in 37 volumes by Shueisha, the series became his most known work. It has sold more than 20 million copies in Japan, has been published in seven countries, including in the United States, and  gained an anime adaptation that aired for 145 episodes from April 2005 to March 2008 on TV Tokyo. For the release of "Eyeshield 21" anime he created the Kome Studio, a company of copyright management to ensure the right of the original creators of manga. The company name, which translates to "rice", was chosen for three reasons: 1) because "Inagaki" contains a kanji ("稲") that can be translated to rice; 2) because "rice" kanji ("米") is also used to represent the United States; and 3) because of the Rice Bowl, an American football championship in Japan. In 2006, he was  chosen, along with Akira Toriyama and Eiichiro Oda, to be a committee member for the Tezuka Award. In June 2010, he published "Kiba&Kiba" in "Weekly Shōnen Jump" along with Bonjae, and his collaboration work with Katsunori Matsui, "Shinpai Kato No Face", was published in the 2011 first issue of "Weekly Young Jump". He published another collaborative work with Matsui, "Alpha Centauri Dōbutsuen"; a two-chapter series, it was published on January 10 and February 10, 2014 in the "Jump X" magazine. Along with Ryoichi Ikegami, he published the one-shot "Kobushi Zamurai" in Shogakukan's "Big Comic Superior" on August  12, 2015. On March 6, 2017, he started to serialize "Dr. Stone" in "Weekly Shōnen Jump" with collaboration of illustrator Boichi. In January 2019, "Dr. Stone" was elected the best "shōnen" manga of 2018 at the 64th Shogakukan Manga Awards. Nineteen volumes of "Dr. Stone" have been released by Shueisha as of January 4, 2021. The series has been popular; it has over 8.4 million copies in circulation in Japan, and has been published in nine countries. It was also adapted into an anime series—the 24-episode first season aired on Tokyo MX between July and December 2019, and  aired a second season between January and March 2021, with a television special scheduled to air in 2022 and a third season in 2023. On December 11, 2020, he started to serialize "Trillion Game" in "Big Comic Superior", once again in collaboration with Ryoichi Ikegami.