Gosho Aoyama (青山 剛昌, Aoyama Gōshō) is a Japanese manga artist best known for the popular manga series, Detective Conan, also known as Case Closed outside of Japan.
Aoyama had a passion for drawing since he was a kid, and began drawing his own manga in elementary school.[2] He later enrolled at Nihon University College of Art in Tokyo, where he continued to pursue his passion for manga.[2] In 1986, Aoyama won the prestigious Shogakukan Manga Award for his debut work, Wait a Minute. Aoyama then begun to work on his debut series, Magic Kaito, which later became a part of the Detective Conan series. Between 1988 and 1993, Aoyama created the series Yaiba, which ran for 24 volumes.
In 1994, Aoyama began serializing Detective Conan. The series follows a high school detective named Shinichi Kudo, who is transformed into a child after being poisoned by a mysterious organization. Under the alias Conan Edogawa, he solves various crimes while searching for a way to return himself to normal. The series has become a cultural phenomenon in Japan, with millions of copies sold and an anime adaptation spanning over a thousand episodes. Due to legal problems with the name "Detective Conan," the English release by VIZ Media renamed the series to Case Closed.
In April 2022, Aoyama featured Rohan Kishibe, the titular protagonist of the Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan series, in his "Detective Picture Book" for the cover of Detective ConanVolume 101, alongside a recommendation to read Millionaire Village.[1] Aoyama described Rohan as a manga artist with an almost inhuman degree of skill and an ability that allows him to read a person's life like a book. Aoyama praised Rohan's eccentricity and his tendency to get involved in bizarre cases, despite being more focused on his manga rather than solving actual cases.
In December 2022, Hirohiko Araki was later asked about this in Kono Mystery ga Sugoi!, in which he was surprised yet humbled to hear Rohan being given the title of "detective." His recommendation of other manga series continued in the next volume of Detective Conan, where he illustrated Seiko Fuji from the manga Police in a Pod. In 2021, he also collaborated with Rei Hiroe and Sunday GX to draw Revy, the protagonist of Black Lagoon.
In 2023, Aoyama designed an original Black Organization member called Pinga for the 26th Detective Conan theatrical film, Black Iron Submarine, which was released on April 14, 2023. During a stage greeting event for the film on September 30, 2023, Aoyama revealed that he created Pinga's androgynous features to make him look like a character from JoJo, which was something the series had never done before.[3]
Detective Conan Volume 101 - Detective Picture Book
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Let me introduce Rohan Kishibe, the most unique of all famous detectives! Rohan is a super popular manga artist with a series in the Shonen Jump magazine. He’s also an eccentric who devotes his entire life to manga! He trains his body for this sole purpose, waking up in the morning to do finger exercises, and immersing himself in his work with an almost inhuman degree of skill. Also, he’s unable to control his curiosity when something catches his eye, which often leads to him getting involved in bizarre cases.
During these bizarre cases, he calls himself forth to investigate with the help of “Heaven's Door,” which has the special ability to read a person’s life like a book. In addition, he uses his intellect and tremendous self-confidence to get to the bottom of the mystery. Despite this, he seems more focused on his manga rather than solving the actual case… By the way, according to the author, Hirohiko Araki, Rohan Kishibe is his “ideal vision of a manga artist.” If I could use Heaven’s Door, I’d like to take a peek inside of Rohan… (laughs)
I wanted to create a character that looked like it came out of JoJo, something that Detective Conan has never done before, so that's how I came up with [Pinga's] face.
Detective Conan Volume 101 - Detective Picture Book
