Yusuke Murata
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Yusuke Murata (村田 雄介, Murata Yūsuke, born July 4, 1978 in Miyagi Prefecture), is a Japanese manga artist. He's best known for illustrating the American football manga Eyeshield 21, in collaboration with writer Riichiro Inagaki. During the creation of this series, his art style developed dramatically. Eyeshield 21 was completed in June 2009.
He was once the assistant and apprentice of Takeshi Obata of Hikaru no Go and Death Note fame. He had a number of one-shots published in Weekly Shonen Jump namely Partner (won the 122nd Hop*Step award), Samui Hanashi (won the 2nd Prize in the 51st Akatsuka Award), Kaitou COLT and of course, Eyeshield 21 which was then serialized starting in Weekly Shonen Jump No. 34 2002. At the age of twelve he entered a contest to design Mega Man villains, and won twice, with the final designs adapted from his sketches. The game credits list his name as responsible for Dust Man from Rockman 4 and Crystal Man from Rockman 5, as well as a thanks credit at the end of Rockman 3.
He wrote and drew a short story, Madofuki Park,[1] for the March 2008 issue of Jump Square, about a futuristic window washer. He also created the one-shot Blust!, centered a boy who was experimented on, obtaining extraordinary powers, its power source being curry. Yet another one-shot created by Murata was featured in the Weekly Shonen Jump magazine in 2010; Minds, a story about a self-sacrificing soldier during a war, set some time in the future.
In an interview with Shonen Jump (magazine) he stated that he was very much interested in the uniforms of American Football teams, especially the Philadelphia Eagles. He also stated that the helmets of the team in Eyeshield 21 were based on the Eagles' helmets.[2]
Murata also illustrated the Shonen Jump 40th Anniversary posters, which displays the popular manga characters that are featured in the magazine. Altogether, he drew four posters for Jump's anniversary.
He recently completed his role as the artist of Donten Prism Solar Car, which is written by Yasuo Ōtagaki (author of Moonlight Mile) and is published in Jump SQ. He is currently collaborating with a Japanese web comic author to create an unique magical girl manga that has yet to be released.