Tetsuo Hara

Tetsuo Hara
Japanese Name	原哲夫
Romaji Name	Hara Tetsuo
Age	65
Birthday	September 2, 1961
Gender	Male
Nationality	Japanese
Occupation	Manga artist

Tetsuo Hara (原哲夫, Hara Tetsuo) is the illustrator of Fist of the North Star alongside writer Buronson. He is also noteable for illustrating the manga The Flowery Keiji.

Tetsuo Hara made his manga debut with a short story titled Super Challenger and found success in 1982 with the series Iron Don Quijote, which would get collected into two volumes that included the Fist of the North Star pilot.

Biography[edit]

Tetsuo Hara was born on September 2, 1961 in Tokyo, Japan but his family eventually moved to Soka, Saitama.

At a young age Hara began drawing characters from manga such as Astro Boy, Jungle Emperor Leo, and Tiger Mask. In third and fourth grade he became obsessed with Shotaro Ishinomori's manga Kamen Rider while the work of Fujio Akatsuka showed him how diverse the medium of manga could be. Hara decided that he wanted to be a manga artist when he grew up at this time. At school he did things such as study yonkoma and enter his high school's design program where he submitted his own manga to be in competitions run by magazines. He also visted the workplace of Osamu Akimoto who was an alumnus of his high school. After graduating, Hara worked as the assistant of Yoshihiro Takahashi.

In 1983, Hara found massive success alongside Buronson with their series Fist of the North Star, which ran until 1983 and spawned a massive franchise and went on to become one of the best-selling manga of all time. From 2001 to 2010 Hara would continue to work on Fist of the North Star in the form of a prequel called Fist of the Blue Sky that Buronson supervised and gave support on.

His next long-running serial was The Flowery Keiji, a period tale loosely based on a novel by Japanese writer Keiichiro Ryu, which was published in Weekly Shonen Jump from 1990 to 1993. Since 2008 It continued to get sequels and an eventual anime adaptation in 2013.

Hara also illustarted the box art for the Capcom arcade game Saturday Night Slam Masters.