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.
JoJo's Bizarre Adventure
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 Conan Volume 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]
On October 5, 2023, Aoyama provided a tribute illustration for the Fist of the North Star 40th Anniversary Exhibition alongside Hirohiko Araki.