Riichiro Inagaki is a Japanese manga writer from Tokyo. He started his career in 2001 publishing works for Shogakukan's magazine Big Comic Spirits. After three one-shots, he moved to Shueisha's Weekly Shōnen Jump, in which he started the work he is best known for, Eyeshield 21. In collaboration with the artist Yusuke Murata, Eyeshield 21 was serialized between July 2002 and June 2009 in Weekly Shōnen Jump, and was later adapted into an animetelevision series. Between 2010 and 2015, Inagaki collaborated with several artists, including Bonjae, Katsunori Matsui, and Ryoichi Ikegami, and published one-shots in different magazines. He started a new serial titled Dr. Stone in Weekly Shōnen Jump in 2017 in collaboration with Boichi.
Biography
Born on June 20, 1976, in Tokyo, Inagaki started to like manga when he read Fujiko Fujio's Manga Michi in middle school. In 1994, he competed at the third Manga Kōshien, a high school manga contest based in Kōchi Prefecture. As it only demanded a one-panel story, Inagaki just threw some ink on the paper to look like he had messed up the story. He said, "People really liked that for some reason. But Manga Koshien isn't something I'm so fond of remembering". After finishing school, he enrolled in a manga and film production company as animation assistant. He started his career as professional manga writer by publishing works in Shogakukan's Big Comic Spirits. He debuted in October 2001 with Nandodemo Roku Gatsu Jū San Hi, and also wrote for the magazine Square Freeze and Love Love Santa, published in November 2001 and in February 2002 respectively. He later moved to Shueisha's Weekly Shōnen Jump, in which he won the 7th "Story King" award for a storyboard of Eyeshield 21. When he planned to create Eyeshield 21, the editorial department asked if he wanted to both write and draw the series, but Inagaki felt he was "so rookie". So he asked Yusuke Murata to be the illustrator. In 2002, they published two one-shots called Eyeshield Part 1 and Part 2 on March 5 and 12 in Weekly Shōnen Jump. The series began to be regularly published on July 23 of the same year in the same magazine. It spanned 333 chapters, the last one published on June 15, 2009, and the series was collected in 37 volumes. The series became his most known work, and gained an anime adaptation, directed by Masayoshi Nishida and co-produced by TV Tokyo, NAS, and Gallop, that aired from April 2005 to March 2008. For the release of Eyeshield 21 anime he created the Kome Studio, a company of copyright management to ensure the right of the original creators of manga. The company name, which translates to "rice", was chosen for three reasons: 1) because "Inagaki" contains a kanji because "rice" kanji because of the Rice Bowl, an American football championship in Japan. In 2006, he was chosen, along with Akira Toriyama and Eiichiro Oda, to be a committee member for the Tezuka Award. In June 2010, he published Kiba&Kiba in Weekly Shōnen Jump along with Bonjae, and his collaboration work with Katsunori Matsui, Shinpai Kato No Face, was published in the 2011 first issue of Weekly Young Jump. He published another collaborative work with Matsui, Alpha Centauri Dōbutsuen; a two-chapter series, it was published on January 10 and February 10, 2014 in the Jump X magazine. Along with Ryoichi Ikegami, he published the one-shotKobushi Zamurai in Shogakukan's Big Comic Superior on August 12, 2015. On March 6, 2017, he started to serialize Dr. Stone in Weekly Shōnen Jump with collaboration of illustrator Boichi. In January 2019, Dr. Stone was elected the best shōnen manga of 2018 at the 64th Shogakukan Manga Awards. Thirteen volumes of Dr. Stone have been released by Shueisha as of November 1, 2019. An anime adaptation of Dr. Stone, directed by Shinya Iino and produced by TMS Entertainment, started to air on July 5, 2019.
