Tetsuo Hara

Born in Tokyo in 1961, Tetsuo Hara made his serialized debut in 1982 with The Iron Don Quixote in Weekly Shonen Jump. The following year, he began illustrating Fist of the North Star in the same magazine, working from Buronson’s story, and it became the biggest hit of his career. From 1988 to 1989, he drew the science-fiction series Cyberblue, with a story by BOB and a script by Ryuichi Mitsui, and he later drew Hana no Keiji: Kumo no Kanata ni and Fist of the Blue Sky.

At Kazuo Koike’s Gekiga Sonjuku school, Hara took to heart the lesson that manga is about character. He designed Kenshiro by combining Bruce Lee, Yusaku Matsuda, and Mel Gibson’s Mad Max hero, and he gave the same care to characters who barely appeared. Mindful of Koike’s advice not to neglect supporting roles, he drew a different helmet for every minor enemy, believing that a character who appears only once deserves to be drawn carefully.