Masami Kurumada

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Masami Kurumada ( Japanese 車 田 正 美 , Kurumada Masami ; born December 6, 1953 in Tsukishima , Chūō , Tokyo , Japan ) is a Japanese manga artist .

biography

Hiroshi Motomiya’s comics moved him to become a manga artist himself. In the third year of high school he took part in the competition of the manga magazine Shōnen Jump for the Young Jump Shō , but did not win it. After graduating from high school in the early 1970s, he worked as an assistant for the comic artist Kō Inoue , who at that time was working with the scenographer Ikki Kajiwara for Shōnen Jump on the manga series Samurai Giants .

Kurumada published his first work as a professional draftsman in 1974 with Sukeban Arashi . His debut work was also his first manga series. It appeared for five weeks in Shōnen Jump , which at that time had a circulation of around 1.6 million, and was continued for a few months in 1975. The breakthrough came with the manga series Ring ni Kakero , on which he worked weekly for Shōnen Jump from 1977 to 1983 . The Shūeisha publishing house also published Ring ni Kakero in 25 anthologies, which sold around thirteen million copies in Japan. The approximately 4,500 pages long Shōnen manga takes place in the world of boxers. While Kurumada initially described a conventional plot, after a while he portrays the boxers' fights as supernatural and with mystical backgrounds.

After the two shorter series Fuma no Kojiro and Otokozaka appeared from 1986 to 1990 at the same time such as Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball manga Saint Seiya in Shonen Jump . In another 4,500 pages in 28 anthologies, which have sold over 28 million times in Japan, Kurumada describes the struggle of the protagonists, who are incarnations of Roman and Greek gods, mythical beasts and constellations, against evil. Saint Seiya was filmed as an anime television series comprising 114 episodes from 1986 to 1989 , while a film adaptation of Ring ni Kakero was not realized as an anime until 2004.

In 1994 Kurumada left Shūeisha and worked for the publishers Kadokawa Shoten and Square Enix . From 1994 to 2000 he drew the science fiction series B't X for Shōnen Ace magazine , which was also implemented as an anime series in 1996 and consists of 2,700 pages in sixteen edited volumes. In 2000 the illustrator returned to Shūeisha and has since worked on a sequel to the Ring ni Kakero manga for the manga magazine Super Jump , which is aimed at an older readership than Shōnen Jump . Another cartoonist Megumu Okada , created from 2002 to 2006 under the title of Saint Seiya: Episode G a new version of Saint Seiya .

Tōkichi Ishiyama and Jun Tomizawa worked as assistants with him. His work has been translated into numerous languages. Only the first ten volumes of B'tX are available in German.

Works (selection)

  • Sukeban Arashi ( ス ケ 番 あ ら し ), 1974–1975
  • Ring ni Kakero (リ ン グ に か け ろ ), 1977–1983
  • Fuma no Kojirō ( 風魔 の 小 次郎 ), 1982–1983
  • Otokozaka ( 男 坂 ), 1984–1985
  • Saint Seiya (聖 闘 士 星矢 , Seinto Seiya ), 1986–1990
  • Silent Night Shō (SILENT KNIGHT 翔 ), 1992
  • B't X , 1994-2000
  • Evil Crusher Maya (EVIL CRUSHER 魔 矢 ), 1998
  • Ring ni Kakero 2 ( リ ン グ に か け ろ 2 ), 2000–2007
  • Saint Seiya: Meiō Shinwa (聖 闘 士 星矢 冥王 神話 ), since 2006

literature

  • Masanao Amano, Julius Wiedermann (Ed.): Manga Design . Taschen Verlag, 2004, ISBN 3-8228-2591-3 , pp. 202-205

Web links

swell

  1. ↑ KTR's Comic Room: Weekly Jump Assistants
  2. ↑ a b Shounen Jump Manga Circulation Numbers , ComiPress, June 1, 2006
personal data
SURNAME Kurumada, Masami
ALTERNATIVE NAMES 車 田 正 美 (Japanese)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Japanese manga artist
DATE OF BIRTH December 6, 1953
PLACE OF BIRTH Tsukishima , Chūō , Tokyo , Japan