Forty years of a meteoric career, more than 200 million copies sold worldwide, entered the Eisner Hall of Fame in 2018 … Rumiko Takahashi is today rewarded as a major author of the world comics.

Born October 10, 1957 in Niigata, Rumiko Takahashi is very interested early comics and, from the college, offers his first works to magazines. Towards the end of her first year at university, she enrolled in the gekiga workshop (realistic mangas for adults) founded by the great writer Kazuo Koike, who is formal: “you, you will become pro”. This prophecy i\was realized the following year, in 1978, when Rumiko Takahashi starts the publication of “Urusei Yatsura”  in the pages of the weekly Sunday. She appropriates the genre of shōnen and refuses to follow the codes of shōjō’s romantic stories, which is unusual for a woman at the time. She is the first to exceed the conventions of the manga, and uses this medium to convey with finesse and humor. With the series “Maison Ikkoku” and “Ranma 1/2″, she will quickly become the queen of shōnen manga – the animated adaptations of her series helping to establish her popularity well beyond the borders of the Japanese archipelago .

Through her drawing, Rumiko Takahashi softens and modernizes the feature of Osamu Tezuka. Lively and expressive, this feature serves the satires she draws, and gives a unique shape to the characters that populate her works. In a society where we do not accept the difference (“the nail that goes by the name of the hammer”, says a well-known saying in Japan), Rumiko Takahashi has always focused on highlighting the underdogs and the eccentrics, making claim their right to a second chance. Known for defects but also deeply human, his heroes have thus marked more than a generation of readers, in a work that, often under the guise of comedy, is extremely progressive.

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