Hiromu Arakawa

Arakawa almost never shows her real face in public, and the handful of genuine photographs that circulate are low in quality and rarely used, so much of her fanbase has no clear picture of her. In their place she draws herself as a bespectacled cow, a nod to the dairy farm where she grew up. The scarcity of images runs so deep that fans have mistaken photos of Romi Park, the voice of Edward Elric, for the author, and Park has stood in for her at public events she cannot attend.

Her creative outlook is plainspoken and warm. She favors everyday moments and people's feelings, then laces them with humor to keep the work entertaining and easy to reach, deliberately holding back on sorrow. Redemption, guilt, coming of age and prejudice recur across her stories. For Fullmetal Alchemist she waded through contradictory alchemy texts, drawn more to their philosophy than their mechanics, and modeled the law of Equivalent Exchange on her parents' hard farm labor. She built the setting after reading about Industrial Revolution Europe, taken especially with England of the era, then folded in her own invented flavor.

Born Hiromi Arakawa on May 8, 1973 in the Tokachi region of Hokkaido, she was raised with several sisters on a dairy and potato farm and pitched in with the chores as a teenager. After agricultural high school she promised her parents seven years of farm work, taking oil painting lessons in town, before moving to Tokyo to chase a manga career and vowing not to return until she could live off the craft. She cut her teeth on doujin projects and short parody comics for the magazine Gamest under the alias Edmund Arakawa, then assisted the artist Eto Hiroyuki.

Her first solo work, the one-shot Stray Dog, appeared in 1999 and won a Shounen GanGan award, securing a contract with Enix. After the short-lived Demons of Shanghai, she began Fullmetal Alchemist in 2001; met with early indifference, it swiftly won readers with its dense plot and ran monthly until 2010, earning the Shogakukan Manga Award in the shonen category in 2003 among other honors. Alongside it she produced the dark comedy Raiden 18, the one-shot Souten no Koumori, and the long series Hero Tales.

In 2011 she signed with Shogakukan's Weekly Shonen Sunday and launched Silver Spoon, her first non-fantasy series, drawn from farm life and a winner of the Manga Taisho Award. Her later credits include the ongoing autobiographical Noble Farmer, an adaptation of The Heroic Legend of Arslan, and Yomi No Tsugai. Married and a mother of several children, she remains one of the most decorated artists in her field.