Aki Shimizu

• 1. Introduction

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  Aki Shimizu grew up in Ōmuta, a city in Fukuoka prefecture. By 1995, she was already earning professional illustration credits, contributing to a PC magazine called Log In. Over the decades that followed, her bibliography reveals a career split between two roles. On some projects she provided the artwork alone, giving visual shape to material written by others. On others she served as both writer and artist, originating the story herself. How she navigated between those two roles, and what she built in each, is what this documentary follows.

• 2. Art for Other Stories

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  In 1998, Aki Shimizu contributed package art and character designs to a Windows game called After Devil Force. The following year, she drew character illustrations for a second Windows title, First Queen: The New World. Also in 1999, her bibliography records her first manga credit: Yato no Kamitsukai, published in Comic Birz, for which she served as illustrator only.

  In 2000, two more manga series entered her bibliography at once. Kumo no Graduale ran in Monthly Comic Flapper, while Blood Sucker: Legend of Zipangu launched in Comic Birz. Blood Sucker would run to twelve volumes before it concluded. On both, she worked purely as the illustrator.

  By 2001, her illustration work had extended to card games. That year she drew art for the Devil Children card game and for the Aquarian Age card game. Every commission she had taken through 2001 had placed her on the illustration side of a creative collaboration. The following year, for the first time, she would serve as both writer and artist on a project.

• 3. Two Series, One Year

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  Qwan and Suikoden III both launched in Monthly Comic Flapper in 2002. On both, Aki Shimizu carried sole credit as writer and artist. That dual authorship marked a significant departure. Every manga entry preceding these two had listed her as illustrator only.

  Suikoden III was adapted from Konami's video game of the same name, and the manga ran to eleven volumes. Qwan, an original work with no existing source material, ran to seven volumes. Creating an original series means building the characters, plotting the story, and writing dialogue where no template exists.

  Monthly Comic Flapper carried both series across multiple years, requiring her to sustain two creative visions without either one faltering. The Suikoden universe she had engaged with through that eleven-volume adaptation would bring her a new commission more than two decades later.

• 4. Shapur of Nameless Land

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  Suikoden: Star Leap appears in Aki Shimizu's bibliography under 2025. The project is described as a manga version of an upcoming title in the Suikoden series. Her contribution is to illustrate one of the story's 108 heroes. That hero is named Shapur, identified as coming from a place called Nameless Land.

  Her bibliography also records a 2016 entry, Graduale der Wolken. It appears under a different title from the Kumo no Graduale she had drawn in 2000. Shapur of Nameless Land, one of 108 named heroes in the Star Leap cast, stands as the most recently announced character illustration in her bibliography.