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, making it one of the best-selling manga series in history. Biography Early life 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. After a school friend praised his manga, he 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 the publishers' offices in Tokyo to find out why in person, taking a manga, Poker Under Arms, that he stayed up all-night to finish. The Shueisha editor he met highly criticized the work, but said it had potential and to clean it up for the upcoming Tezuka Awards. Debut and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Araki left Miyagi University of Education before graduating, and made his debut under the name in 1980 with the wild west one-shot Poker Under Arms, which was a "Selected Work" at that year's Tezuka Award. His first serialization was Cool Shock B.T. in 1983, about a young magician who solves mysteries. But the first series to display his signature amount of gore was 1984's Baoh. It tells the story of a man who is implanted with a parasite by an evil organization, giving him superhuman powers, and follows as he fights against them. It was adapted into an OVA in 1989, the manga was released in the US by Viz Media in 1990 (in tankōbon form in 1995), but the OVA didn't get a stateside release until 2002. It wasn't until The Gorgeous Irene in 1985, that he really developed his signature art style of buff, muscular characters (it would later become more flamboyant). His next series would become his magnum opus, 1987's JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. The series begins in 1880s England and follows Jonathan Joestar (JoJo) and his adopted brother Dio