Katsuhiro Otomo

In 2005, Otomo was decorated a Chevalier of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, promoted to Officier of the order in 2014, and became the fourth manga artist ever inducted into the American Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 2012. Celebrated in Japan, he was also awarded the Purple Medal of Honor from the national government in 2013. In addition, Otomo later received the Winsor McCay Award at the 41st Annie Awards in 2014 and the 2015 Grand Prix de la ville d'Angoulême, the first manga artist to receive the award.

Katsuhiro Otomo was born in Tome, Miyagi Prefecture and grew up in Tome District. He said that living in the very rural Tōhoku region left him with nothing to do as a child, so he read a lot of manga. As the only boy in a family with older and younger sisters, he enjoyed reading and drawing manga on his own and thought about becoming a manga artist. Limited by his parents to buying one manga book a month, Otomo typically chose Kobunsha's Shōnen magazine, which included Astro Boy by Osamu Tezuka and Tetsujin 28-go by Mitsuteru Yokoyama, series which he would copy drawing in elementary school. However, he said it was after reading Shotaro Ishinomori's How to Draw Manga that he understood how to draw manga properly and started doing so more seriously. In high school, Otomo developed an interest in movies, that led to his ambition to become an illustrator or film director. At this time, one of his friends introduced him to an editor at Futabasha, who, after seeing Otomo's manga, told the high school student to contact him if he moved to Tokyo after graduating. Otomo did exactly that, and began his career in Tokyo as a 19-year old professional manga artist.

On October 4, 1973, Otomo published his first work, a manga adaptation of Prosper Mérimée's short story "Mateo Falcone," titled "A Gun Report." In 1979, after writing multiple short-stories for the magazine Weekly Manga Action, Otomo created his first science-fiction work, titled Fireball. Although the manga was never completed, it is regarded as a milestone in Otomo's career as it contained many of the same themes he would explore in his later, more successful manga such as Dōmu. Dōmu began serialization in January 1980 and ran until July 1981. It was not published in book form until 1983, when it won the Nihon SF Taisho Award. It also won the 1984 Seiun Award for Best Comic. In a collaboration with writer Toshihiko Yahagi, Otomo illustrated Kibun wa mō Sensō about a fictional war that erupts in the border between China and the Soviet Union. It was published in Weekly Manga Action from 1980 to 1981 and collected into one volume in 1982. It won the 1982 Seiun Award for Best Comic. 38 years later, the two created the one-shot sequel Kibun wa mō Sensō 3 (Datta Kamo Shirenai) for the April 16, 2019 issue of the magazine. Also in 1981, Otomo drew A Farewell to Weapons for the November 16 issue of Kodansha's Young Magazine. It was later included in the 1990 short story collection Kanojo no Omoide... In 1982, Otomo began what would become his most acclaimed and famous work: Akira. Kodansha had been asking him to write a series for their new Young Magazine for some time, but he had been busy with other work. From the first meeting with the publisher, Akira was to be only about ten chapters "or something like that," so Otomo said he was really not expecting it to be a success. It was serialized for eight years and 2000 pages of artwork. In 1990, Otomo did a brief interview with MTV for a general segment on the Japanese manga scene at the time. Otomo created the one-shot Hi no Yōjin about people who put out fires in Japan's Edo period for the debut issue of Comic Cue in January 1995. Otomo wrote the 2002 picture book Hipira: The Little Vampire, which was illustrated by Shinji Kimura. Otomo created the full-color work DJ Teck no Morning Attack for the April 2012 issue of Geijutsu Shincho. Following the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, Otomo, a native of the Tōhoku region, designed a relief that features a boy riding a robot goldfish in rough seas, while flanked by Fūjin and Raijin. Intended to capture the region's will to overcome the natural disaster, it has been located on the first floor of the terminal building at Sendai Airport since March 2015. Otomo was initially reported in 2012 to be working on his first long-form manga since Akira. Planning to draw the work that is set during Japan's Meiji period without assistants, he was initially targeting a younger audience, but said the story had developed more towards an older one. Although planned to begin in fall 2012, Otomo revealed in November of that year that the series had been delayed. By 2018, Otomo said he was doing a full-length work, but the contents were still secrets. In 2022, Kodansha released Otomo's entire body of manga since 1971 as part of "The Complete Works Project," which featured six separate releases of two books each. It was noted that some of his manga were edited when initially compiled into book format, and this new project, personally overseen by Otomo, restored them to how they appeared in their original serialization.

Otomo said that when he started his professional career in the late 1970s, "almost all manga was gekiga like Golgo 13. So it was all gekiga or sports manga, nothing to do with science fiction." Remembering how much he loved science fiction as a child, Otomo wanted to recreate that kind of excitement; "That was in part how something like Domu came about. [...] There was no hard science fiction manga [...] so I wanted to change that and do something more realistic and believable." Describing his characterization style, Otomo said he first tried to draw and imitate "very traditional manga-like art," such as Astro Boy. But by the time he was in high school, illustration work by people like Tadanori Yokoo and Yoshitaro Isaka was popular, so he wanted to create manga characters with this illustrative art style. When asked about how Japanese critics praise him as the first manga artist to draw realistic Japanese faces, Otomo said he always tries to balance fantasy and realism; "Depicting things too realistically actually damages the social realism of the piece, and if you go too far into the realm of fantasy, that hurts its imaginative ability." However, he said the realism of his early works probably came from having used friends as character models. French cartoonist Moebius, who is known for realistic character designs, is often cited as one of Otomo's biggest influences. Otomo is considered to be one of the artists of the New Wave in manga in the late 1970s and 1980s especially due to his visual innovation. Otomo includes homages to his favorite childhood manga in his work, and there were three manga authors that he really respected at that time; Osamu Tezuka, Shotaro Ishinomori and Mitsuteru Yokoyama. He named the main computer in Fireball ATOM after Tezuka's character of the same name, the character nicknamed Ecchan in Domu is a reference to Ishinomori's Sarutobi Ecchan, and the title character of Akira is also known as No. 28 in homage to Yokoyama's Tetsujin 28-go in addition to the two series having the "same overall plot." Ever since depicting the apartment complex in Domu, Otomo has had a large interest in architecture, proclaiming, "I don't think there was anyone before me who put this much effort into their depictions of buildings." He believes this habit of drawing detailed backgrounds was influenced by Shigeru Mizuki's manga, which showed him how important backdrops are to a story. Otomo strongly praised the framing done by Tetsuya Chiba, whose work he studied a lot out of admiration at a store in Kichijoji, for making it easy to grasp how tangible the backgrounds and characters are. It was taken from Chiba's Notari Matsutaro, a seinen sports manga that mainly inspired Otomo to develop his grammar for making manga, including Domu. When asked about his influences in designing the mecha in Farewell to Weapons, Otomo pointed out that Studio Nue's work was popular at the time, specifically mentioning the powered suit designs by Kazutaka Miyatake and Naoyuki Kato. He also stated that he is a fan of mecha by Takashi Watabe and Makoto Kobayashi and is fond of those seen in Neon Genesis Evangelion, but explained that all his influences are jumbled and mixed together; "In short, I digest many different things and ideas tend to pop out from that."