Yasuhiro Nightow

Biography

Yasuhiro Nightow grew up moving around Japan: born in Yokohama, he relocated to Yokosuka in elementary school, then spent his junior high and high school years in Shizuoka. His first taste of comics came from Fujio Akatsuka's Tensai Bakabon, and he later fell under the influence of Leiji Matsumoto's work, including Cosmoship Yamato, Captain Harlock, and Galaxy Express 999. He also admired the artists in Shogakukan's Weekly Shōnen Sunday, like Rumiko Takahashi and Fujihiko Hosono, and among the "new wave" crowd, he was a fan of Katsuhiro Otomo's Sayonara Nippon and Fumiko Takano. At Housei University, he started with social science before switching to media studies as his major. While there, he drew manga for fun and put out some dojinshi. After graduating, he took a job at Sekisui House selling apartments, a gig that lasted three and a half years before he left to draw full-time. His first one-shot manga was based on the Samurai Spirits video game series, and he also wrote a story called Call XXXX that appeared in Super Jump magazine. A friend who worked in publishing helped him submit a Trigun story to the February 1995 issue of Tokuma Shoten's Shōnen Captain, and he started regular serialization just two months later. When Shōnen Captain shut down early in 1997, the magazine Young King Ours, from Shōnen Gahōsha, reached out about starting something new. Nightow was uneasy about leaving Trigun unfinished, so he asked if he could wrap it up instead. The publishers agreed, and the manga picked back up in 1997 under the new name Trigun Maximum, with the story jumping ahead two years. Nightow has said the title change was simply because of the switch in publishers. Trigun Maximum ran until 2007, filling 14 tankōbon volumes. The original Trigun series got an anime adaptation from Madhouse, which had a limited TV run in 1998, later aired in English on Cartoon Network. Its popularity in the United States led to a feature film, Trigun: Badlands Rumble, in 2010. Nightow also created the characters and story for the Sega/Red Entertainment video game series Gungrave, a third-person shooter that later received its own anime adaptation.