Who is Katsuya Terada?

Katsuya Terada was born on December 7, 1963, in Tamano, Okayama, and grew up the way his generation of Japanese artists did, spending his pocket money on Weekly Shonen Jump. At fifteen he found the French artist Jean Giraud, known as Moebius, and Katsuhiro Otomo of Akira, and the two of them set his compass: European line and atmosphere, manga energy. In junior high he settled on book illustration over manga for a disarmingly honest reason he still repeats: an illustrator does not have to think about the story.

He studied design in high school, then at Asagaya College of Art and Design in Tokyo, took his first professional work while still a student, and went freelance in 1984. A commission at twenty-one, character designs, background illustrations and manual art for games, pulled him into the Japanese games industry, where a generation of covers and guides followed: Detective Jinguji Saburo for Data East, Nintendo Power and the Zelda player's guides, the Super Famicom Prince of Persia cover, and the character redesigns for Sega's Virtua Fighter 2 in 1994.

Film kept calling. He designed costumes for Zeiram, the characters for the anime film Blood: The Last Vampire in 2000, costume and concept work for Cutie Honey and Devilman, mecha and character design for Yatterman, creatures for Kamen Rider W and Monster X for Godzilla: Final Wars. In America he is tied to Iron Man and Hellboy, one of his Hellboy illustrations became an official statuette, and Dark Horse has published his manga and art books in English.

Underneath all of it is the habit that named him. Terada calls himself a rakugaki artist: drawing is not a job step, it is a constant, done on the subway, in notebooks bought by the box, on any surface at hand. His alias Rakugakingu welds rakugaki, doodling, to king, and he glosses it himself as 'doodle plus ing'. The marathon runner comparison is his too: every day of drawing is training for the one line he is chasing.