Who Is Hiroaki Samura?
Hiroaki Samura was born on February 17, 1970, in Chiba Prefecture. He always wanted to draw manga, but unlike most manga artists he trained formally first: he attended art school and studied oil painting, a classical education that shows in everything he has drawn since. He is cheerfully open in interviews about disliking oil painting from the start, largely because of the smell of the paint, and about finding help to get himself through the course.
He never finished it. Before graduating he was picked up by Kodansha's Monthly Afternoon, won the magazine's Four Seasons Award with the chapter that became Blade of the Immortal, and spent the next nineteen years drawing that one series. The classical training stayed: it is the reason his pages are built like drawings first and comics second, a method this Library documents on the art page.
