Tetsuo Hara

Tetsuo Hara (born September 2, 1961) is a Japanese manga artist. He is best-known for creating the post-apocalyptic martial arts series Fist of the North Star (1983–1988) with writer Buronson, which is one of the best-selling manga in history with over 100 million copies in circulation. He worked as an assistant to manga artist Yoshihiro Takahashi after graduating. As an amateur, he won the first prize of the 33rd Fresh Jump award for his boxing short story Super Challenger. Hara's professional career began with his first published work: Mad Fighter in 1982. His first serialized work in the Weekly Shōnen Jump was the Iron Don Quixote, a motocross manga which lasted only ten weeks in serialization. He achieved fame after the publication of Fist of the North Star in 1983, which he co-created with Buronson and ran for six years in Weekly Shōnen Jump. His next long-running serial was Keiji, a period tale loosely based on a novel by Keiichiro Ryu, which was published in Weekly Shōnen Jump from 1990 to 1993. It was through Kazuhiko Torishima that Hara received the offer from Capcom to create the character designs for the 1993 video game Saturday Night Slam Masters. Hara would go on to produce several shorter serials and one-shots for Shueisha until departing from the company in 2000. In 2001, he became one of the founding members of the manga editing company Coamix and would go on to illustrate Fist of the Blue Sky, a prequel to Fist of the North Star, which was serialized in Weekly Comic Bunch from 2001 until the magazine's final issue in 2010. Originally published as a weekly serial, it was changed to a semi-regular feature after Hara was diagnosed with keratoconus. Despite previously announcing his intentions to retire after completing Fist of the Blue Sky, he went on to illustrate his current series Ikusa no Ko: The Legend of Nobunaga Oda, written by Seibo Kitahara and published in Monthly Comic Zenon since 2010. An English edition of Ikusa no Ko is concurrently published at the official Silent Manga Audition Community website. In 2021, Hara said that rather than creating work on his own, he was more interested in working with younger artists to create works as a team and pass on his forty years of experience.