Akio Tanaka

Akio Tanaka ( Japanese た な か 亜 希夫 , Tanaka Akio ; born January 6, 1956 in Ishinomaki , Miyagi Prefecture , Japan ) is a Japanese manga artist .

Life

Along with Rumiko Takahashi and Caribu Marley, Tanaka was one of the first to graduate from the Gekiga Sonjuku private school founded by Kazuo Koike in 1977 , which specializes primarily in drawing and writing comics. He started working as a professional draftsman in the 1980s.

Together with the well-known scenario artist Caribu Marley, he created the successful manga series Meisōō Border, which appeared weekly from 1986 to 1989 in the manga magazine Manga Action . The Manga Action , aimed like most other magazines, working for Tanaka, mainly on adult men, that published his -Mangas. Meisō ou Border comprises around 3100 pages and has also been published in fourteen edited volumes by the Futabasha publishing house.

He also worked with Caribu Marley in 1986 for Manga Action, the manga series A hōmansu comprising an anthology , which was made into a film by Yūsaku Matsuda that same year . This was followed by other smaller works for Futabasha and the Manga Action magazine, including Hito ga hito o aisuru koto no dō shiyō mo nasa together with Takashi Ishii . A longer series only came with Crash! Masamune again, which he created from 1995 to 1998 based on a story by Nobuya Kobayashi.

Tanaka only supplies the drawings for his greatest success to date, Shamo , on which he has been working since 1998 with Izō Hashimoto , who is responsible for writing the story. Shamo is about a sixteen-year-old from a wealthy family who murders his parents, then goes to a prison for juvenile offenders, and then starts a successful career as a karateka. The manga was in Manga Action until 2003 , but after it was temporarily stopped, it moved to the Kōdansha publishing house's Evening magazine , where it has been published ever since. So far, the series consists of around 5000 pages in 25 anthologies. (Status: February 2007) Shamo was nominated for the Osamu Tezuka Culture Prize in 2003 , but was not awarded.

From 2003 to 2005, Morning magazine, one of the manga magazines with the highest circulation for adult men, published his 850-page comic series Glaucos about a boy who does apnea diving as an extreme sport and who seems to have a special connection to the sea. From 2004 Kōdansha Glaucos published in four anthologies.

His work is translated into Spanish, French and German, among others.

Works (selection)

• Meisōō Border ( 迷 走 王 ボ ー ダ ー ), 1986–1989
• A hōmansu ( ア ・ ホ ー マ ン ス ), 1986
• Fujiwara-kun ( フ ジ ワ ラ く ん ), 1989
• Minami kaiki sen ( 南 回 帰 船 ), 1990–1991
• Samurai Nippon ( 侍 に っ ぽ ん ), 1991
• Rakkīman ( ら っ き ー ま ん ), 1992–1993
• 20-seiki Densetsu ( 20 世紀 伝 説 ), 1994–1995
• Hito ga Hito o Aisuru Koto no Dōshiyō mo nasa ( 人 が 人 を 愛 す る 事 の ど う し よ う も な さ ), 1995
• Crash! Masamune ( ク ラ ッ シ ュ! 正宗 ), 1995–1998
• Shamo ( 軍 鶏 ), since 1998
• Glaucos ( グ ロ コ ス ), 2003–2005