is an erotic manga artist who was prolific in the 1980s and '90s. Several of Maeda's works have been used as a basis for original video animations (OVA) including La Blue Girl, Adventure Kid, Demon Beast Invasion, Demon Warrior Koji and his most notorious work, Urotsukidōji (Legend of the Overfiend). An interviewer commented that Urotsukidōji "firmly placed him in the history books—in Japan and abroad—as the pioneer of the genre known as hentai, or "perverted". Early career Toshio Maeda began reading manga when he was 5 or 6 years old, as well as American comics such as Mighty Mouse, Spider-Man and Batman. He was also a reader of all genres of literature and has said that he read more than 10,000 books before he was 20 years old. Career At 16 Maeda left Osaka to go to Tokyo as an assistant to a professional cartoonist. He became interested in manga for adults to avoid all the sexual, political and religious restrictions that were placed on manga for children. Early in his career, with the likes of Evil Spirit Island and Ashita-e Kick Off, he only provided the illustrations while someone else wrote the text for the manga. Maeda is credited with the proliferation of the tentacle rape genre. Maeda's first usage of tentacles in his manga was in 1976, in an experimental short story published in the magazine Special Young Comic titled SEX Tearing. The reason for drawing tentacles in the story was that Maeda was not allowed to draw male genitals. Maeda's best known series, Urotsukidōji, came out in 1986 and gained popularity abroad. The Erotic Anime Movie Guide (1998) claimed that "No other title apart from Akira has been so influential in the English-language market". Maeda was working for an adult magazine at the time and wanted to create something different in terms of erotica. Maeda has mentioned that since portraying genitals was illegal in Japan, artists would use any trick they could to get by the censors and he could say that a creature's tentacle was not a penis. Maeda has embraced his role in popularizing the genre and in a blog interview stated that he would like "Tentacle Master" inscribed on his tombstone. In 1999, Maeda collaborated with Phoenix Entertainment (who previously adapted one of Maeda's works, Gedou Gakuen (or Nightmare Campus, as it is called overseas)) as an executive producer to work on a three