Takehiko Inoue is a Japanese manga artist. He is best known for the basketball series Slam Dunk, which is one of the best-selling manga series in history, and the samurai manga Vagabond. Many of his works are about basketball, Inoue himself being a huge fan of the sport. His works sold in North America through Viz Media are Slam Dunk, Vagabond and Real, although Slam Dunk was earlier translated by Gutsoon! Entertainment. In 2012, Inoue became the first recipient of the Cultural Prize at the Asia Cosmopolitan Awards.
Career
Before his debut, Inoue was an assistant to Tsukasa Hojo on City Hunter. He made his debut in 1988, when appeared in Weekly Shōnen Jump magazine. It won the 35th annual Tezuka Award. His first serialization was in 1989 with Chameleon Jail, for which he was the illustrator of a story written by Kazuhiko Watanabe. Inoue's first real fame came with his next manga, Slam Dunk, about a basketball team from Shohoku High School. It was published in Weekly Shōnen Jump from 1990 to 1996 and has sold over 120 million copies in Japan alone. In 1995 it received the 40th annual Shogakukan Manga Award for shōnen manga and in 2007 was declared Japan's favorite manga. Slam Dunk was adapted into a 101 episode animetelevision series and four movies. Inoue launched Buzzer Beater as an online comic in May 1996 on the Sports-i ESPN website. It is about a basketball team from Earth that attempts to compete on the intergalactic level, it appears on his official web site in four languages: Japanese, English, Chinese, and Korean. Buzzer Beater was produced into a 13 episode anime series in 2005. In 2007, a second 13 episode series was produced. Both seasons were animated by TMS Entertainment. Vagabond was Inoue's next manga, adapted from the fictionalized accounts by Eiji Yoshikawa of the samurai Miyamoto Musashi, which he began drawing in 1998. It won him the Kodansha Manga Award for General manga in 2000 and the Osamu Tezuka Culture Award in 2002. While still working on Vagabond, Inoue began drawing Realin 1999, his third basketball manga, which focuses on wheelchair basketball. It received an Excellence Prize at the 2001 Japan Media Arts Festival. In addition, he also contributed character designs for the Xbox 360 RPG, Lost Odyssey.
