Hirohiko Araki

About

Toshiyuki Araki (Japanese: 荒木 利之, Hepburn: Araki Toshiyuki; born June 7, 1960), better known as Hirohiko Araki (荒木 飛呂彦, Araki Hirohiko), 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 as of 2022, making it one of the best-selling manga series in history.

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, as well as British and American rock stars including David Bowie and Prince.
After a school friend praised his manga, Araki 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…