Satoshi Kurusu

Satoshi Kurusu (来栖さとし) is a Japanese manga artist. He worked at Lucky Land Communications as one of Hirohiko Araki's assistants from 2001 to 2004, during the publication of Stone Ocean and Steel Ball Run.

Biography
Satoshi Kurusu was born in 1978. He first encountered JoJo's Bizarre Adventure in November 1989, when Empress said "Chumimi~in" in the 35th chapter of Stardust Crusaders. At some point in June 2001, Kurusu started living in Tokyo alone, aspiring to become a manga artist. However, believing he had no money, ideas, or talent to do so, he decided it would be better to start working as an assistant to a manga artist first. He hoped that one day he could work for Hirohiko Araki, who he admired.

When he was 23 years old on October 29, 2001, Kurusu saw an advertisement in Weekly Shonen Jump stating that Araki is recruiting assistants for Stone Ocean. Kurusu immediately applied and got a call from Shueisha 9 days later. He was hired and Araki called him afterwards to let him know the location of his office and what time he should be there to start working the day after.

As Araki's assistant, Kurusu drew backgrounds and the clothing designs of characters. He also brought Araki meals everyday and managed the art supplies. His favorite battle to draw was the Heavy Weather fight as the assistants had to draw a massive amount of snails without even knowing the context.

Kurusu worked for Araki until 2004, during the first half of Steel Ball Run. He was the illustrator of I Am a Hero in IBARAKI using the pen name Kazuya Fujisawa, which was published on February 28, 2017. After creating a Twitter account, he started posting tutorials of techniques he learned from Araki on his pixivFANBOX starting from August 27, 2019. He also started a series called Hirohiko Araki Does Not Move (荒木飛呂彦先生は動かない) on October 29, 2019, with the title based on Rohan Kishibe Does Not Move (Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan). It is an autobiographical series of how Kurusu started working for Araki, which has 3 chapters. He continued it with a free chapter posted on Twitter called Memories of JoJo's Workplace (ジョジョの仕事場の思い出), on April 26, 2020.

On October 25, 2022, he started serializing the manga Everyone Except Me’s a Zombie?!, published on Yahoo's ebookjapan service.

Trivia

 * Kurusu's favorite JoJo part is Diamond is Unbreakable and his favorite character overall is Rohan Kishibe.