Tetsuo Hara

Japanese Name

原哲夫

Romanized Name

Hara Tetsuo

Profile

Age

63

Birthday

September 2, 1961 (Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan)

Zodiac Sign

Virgo

Gender

Male

Blood Type

A^[1]

Nationality

Japanese

Occupation

Manga artist

Other Information

Relationships
Ryo Fukawa (cousin)

Affiliation

Coamix

Media

Manga Debut

Super Challenger

Website

@haratetsuo_jp
Official Website

Tetsuo Hara (原哲夫, Hara Tetsuo) is a Japanese manga artist. He is best known for being the illustrator of the manga Fist of the North Star alongside writer Buronson, its prequel Fist of the Blue Sky, and Keiji.

Hara is known for influencing JoJo's Bizarre Adventure in multiple ways, most notably with the hypermasculine art style featured within the first three parts. Hirohiko Araki considers him a close friend.^[2]

Biography

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

At a young age Hara began drawing characters from manga such as Astro Boy, Jungle Emperor Leo, and Tiger Mask. He became obsessed with Shotaro Ishinomori's manga Kamen Rider and the work of Fujio Akatsuka, which showed him how far the medium of manga could go. Hara decided that he wanted to be a manga artist when he grew up, so he did things such as study yonkoma and entered his high school's design program where he submitted his own manga to be in competitions run by magazines. He also visited 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 1988 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 fuedal Japanese 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 has continued to do work and illustrations, such as doing box art for the Japanese version of the Capcom arcade game Saturday Night Slam Masters and doing the album art for the band Junretsu. Though not a writer or illustrator, Hara is supervising a sequel to Fist of the Blue Sky called Fist of the Blue Sky Re:Genesis, which is being written by Hiroyuki Yatsu and illustrated by Hideki Tsuji.