Who is Hiromu Arakawa?

Hiromu Arakawa was born on May 8, 1973 and raised on a dairy farm in Hokkaido, the northern island of Japan. Farm work shaped her storytelling from the ground up: Fullmetal Alchemist returns again and again to labor, food, family obligation and the idea that nothing is gained without work, and her later series Silver Spoon is set on an agricultural high school drawn directly from her own upbringing.

Before her own series, Arakawa worked as an assistant to Hiroyuki Eto on Mahojin Guru Guru and published the one shot Stray Dog, which won an award in Square Enix's newcomer competition. Her big break came in 2001, when Fullmetal Alchemist began in Monthly Shonen Gangan. It ran for nine years, 108 chapters, and became one of the defining manga of its generation, with more than 80 million copies in circulation worldwide.

Arakawa draws herself as a bespectacled cow in author notes and bonus comics, a joke about her farm childhood that became her public signature. She is famously private about her face and family, and famously productive: colleagues and editors describe a creator who plans far ahead, which is one reason Fullmetal Alchemist's foreshadowing pays off so cleanly across its 27 volumes.

After Fullmetal Alchemist ended in 2010 she drew the fantasy adventure Hero Tales from a story by Huang Jin Zhou, then Silver Spoon, a warm and precise portrait of farm school life that ran from 2011 to 2019 and won major awards in Japan. In 2021 she returned to dark fantasy with Daemons of the Shadow Realm, published in English by Square Enix Manga.

For collectors, Arakawa matters because she is both writer and artist of her flagship series. Every tankobon cover, bonus gag strip and art book illustration in Fullmetal Alchemist comes from the same hand, which makes her collected editions and illustration books unusually coherent objects to collect.