Who is Tatsuya Endo, the creator of Spy x Family?

Tatsuya Endo was born on July 23, 1980, in Ibaraki Prefecture, and wanted to draw manga from childhood, reading Weekly Shonen Jump alongside his older brother. He debuted in 2000 with the one-shot Seibu Yugi (Western Game), published in Akamaru Jump after recognition in Shueisha's Story King competition, and followed it the same year with a one-shot version of Blade of the Moon Princess in Weekly Shonen Jump itself.

The long apprenticeship is the part of the record most profiles skip. Endo worked as an assistant on Blue Exorcist, Fire Punch, Attack on Titan and Kono Oto Tomare, and was mentored by Yasuhiro Kano and Yoshiyuki Nishi. His own first serializations, Tista (2007 to 2008) and Blade of the Moon Princess (2010 to 2012), both ran in Jump Square and both were dark. The editor on Tista was Shihei Lin, and the partnership held: when Lin moved to the Shonen Jump+ department, Endo followed him, and the two developed Spy x Family together after more than a decade of working side by side.

Lin's public account of Endo's method is unusually specific for an editor: Endo thinks through every detail of a plot, spots contradictions in proposed ideas immediately, and builds characters around shifts in their psychological state. Lin also credits the manga's appeal to Endo's clean art and his ability to convey emotion, a judgment the review pages agreed with once the series landed.

The honors arrived fast once the series did. Spy x Family won the web manga category of the 2019 Next Manga Awards, the Kono Manga ga Sugoi! 2020 ranking for male readers, and the 4th Tsutaya Comic Awards in 2020. Endo's stated favorite artists are Akira Toriyama, Hiroyuki Nishimori and Minetaro Mochizuki, a reading list that explains a good deal of the page: gag timing, clean staging, and psychological close-ups in one hand.