What did Yoshitaka Amano do after leaving Tatsunoko?

Fifteen years after walking in as a schoolboy, Amano resigned from Tatsunoko in 1982, at the age of thirty, exchanging an established career for the precarious life of a freelancer. He had already begun publishing the monthly strip Twilight Worlds in S-F Magazine in March 1981, a world of his own rather than a studio's characters.

The freelance years exploded. From 1982 he illustrated Baku Yumemakura's Chimera books; in 1983 came Hideyuki Kikuchi's Demon City Shinjuku and the first Vampire Hunter D novel. Japan's science fiction readers noticed: Amano won the Seiun Award, the country's top SF honour, in the art category four years running, from 1983 to 1986.

His first collection of paintings, Maten, appeared in 1984. By the time Square came calling in 1987, Amano was no longer an animator looking for work. He was the illustrator other writers wanted on their covers, and those covers, for D, for Guin, for Elric, are the middle shelf of this hub.