Hirohiko Araki

• 1. Introduction

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  Hirohiko Araki is a Japanese manga artist, and by 2022 his best-known series had more than 120 million copies in circulation. That makes JoJo's Bizarre Adventure one of the best-selling manga in history. The story has now been serialized for almost 40 years, and its imagery has spread far beyond the printed page. Behind those numbers stands a creator whose work appears on album covers, museum walls and public displays. This documentary asks how Araki found his way into the profession in the first place. It asks how one saga kept reinventing itself across so many years. And it asks why a world-famous museum and a luxury fashion house both came calling.

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• 2. A Hidden Hobby

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  Sendai is where Araki grew up, in a household with his parents and younger identical twin sisters. He later credited his sisters' annoyances with driving him to his room, where he passed the time reading manga. Of everything he read, he named Ai to Makoto as the most important to him.

  He supposes that his father's art books are what made him want to draw manga. The French artist Paul Gauguin left the strongest mark on him. He also took inspiration from British and American rock stars, including David Bowie and Prince.

  A school friend's praise for his manga turned a pastime into a secret. From then on, Araki drew behind his parents' backs. In his first year of high school, he sent his first finished work to a magazine.

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• 3. The Trip To Tokyo

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  Every submission Araki sent came back rejected. Meanwhile, other artists his own age, or even younger, were making successful debuts. Rather than keep guessing why, he decided to travel to the publishers' offices in Tokyo and ask in person.

  He brought along a manga called Poker Under Arms, which he had stayed up all night to finish. The editor he met at Shueisha was harsh about the work. Even so, the editor saw potential in it, and told Araki to clean it up for the upcoming Tezuka Awards.

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• 4. Early Series

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  Araki left Miyagi University of Education before graduating, and in 1980 he made his debut with the wild west one-shot Poker Under Arms. That story was chosen as a Selected Work at the Tezuka Award the same year.

  Cool Shock B.T., his first serialization, arrived in 1983. It followed a young magician who solves mysteries. A year later, Baoh brought graphic violence into his pages. Its hero is a man implanted with a parasite by an evil organization, which grants him superhuman powers as he fights back.

  Baoh traveled overseas in an uneven order. An OVA adaptation appeared in 1989, and Viz Media released the manga in the US in 1990, in tankōbon form in 1995. The OVA had to wait until 2002 for a US release.

  The Gorgeous Irene, in 1985, made large, muscular characters a central part of his art. That style grew steadily more flamboyant in later works. In 1987 he began the series that would become his magnum opus.

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• 5. The Joestar Line

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  England in the 1880s is where JoJo's Bizarre Adventure begins, with Jonathan Joestar, nicknamed JoJo, and his adopted brother Dio Brando. Dio eventually tries to kill their father to get his share of the inheritance. When confronted, he puts on an ancient mask that turns him into a vampire. Jonathan answers by learning a breathing technique called Hamon, which gives him various powers to fight Dio.

  Later arcs follow the descendants of the Joestar family, and many take place in different parts of the world. Stardust Crusaders, the third arc, became the most popular. It plays down both the vampire plot and the Hamon technique. In their place it introduces a new kind of power called Stands, which remain the focus of the series today.

  Weekly Shōnen Jump carried the story from the start. For the eighth arc, JoJolion, Araki moved to Ultra Jump magazine and worked on it from 2011 to 2021.

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• 6. Anime And Memes

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  David Production and Warner Bros. made the internationally popular TV adaptations of JoJo, and Araki was not directly involved in the production. He served as an executive overseer and big-picture decision-maker, working to keep the adaptations faithful to his original. The source material was hard to adapt in both practical and conceptual terms. So producer Hisataka Kasama hired two directors with different skill sets, Naokatsu Tsuda and Kenichi Suzuki, and had them work together.

  Once the first two arcs reached television, the show's "To Be Continued" screens took on a life of their own. They were scored with Roundabout, a 1971 hit by Yes. Video sites such as YouTube and Vine parodied them until they went viral. The phrase "Jojo reference" became a meme too, thanks to the show's wide reach and the bizarre situations its characters keep meeting.

  The series has directly inspired a surprising range of global media. These include the Japanese card game and TV franchise Yu-Gi-Oh!, as well as American TV series from Family Guy to Paw Patrol.

  The adaptations are still moving forward. The anime for the seventh installment, Steel Ball Run, was officially announced on the 12th of April 2025 at the JOJODAY event.

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• 7. Louvre And Gucci

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  In 2009, the Musée du Louvre chose Araki as one of five artists to create original works set at the famous museum. His piece, Rohan at the Louvre, starred Rohan Kishibe from JoJo. It appeared in an exhibit titled Le Louvre invite la bande dessinée, or "The Louvre Invites Comic-Strip Art", which was created to show the diversity of comics. The exhibit ran from the 19th of January to the 13th of April, and the piece was highly praised.

  The following year, Rohan at the Louvre was published in France and also ran in Japan's Ultra Jump. NBM Publishing released it in the US in February 2012.

  From the 17th of September to the 6th of October 2011, the Gucci store in Shinjuku hosted an exhibition called "Rohan Kishibe Goes to Gucci". It was a collaboration among Gucci, Araki and the fashion magazine Spur, and it celebrated Gucci's 90th anniversary. The show featured a life-size figure of Rohan Kishibe and numerous illustrations by Araki. These included actual pieces from the brand's 2011-2012 fall/winter collection, along with his own original fashion designs.

  Spur ran a full-color Rohan one-shot by Araki in its October 2011 issue, titled Kishibe Rohan meets Gucci. In February 2013 it ran another spinoff, Jolyne, Fly High with Gucci, starring Jolyne Cujoh from Part 6. A free English translation of that story is available on Gucci's Facebook page.

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• 8. Covers And Commissions

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  The September 2007 issue of the journal Cell carried a cover drawn by Araki. On it, a ligase appears as one of his Stands. The next year he drew the cover art for a collection featuring Yasunari Kawabata's short story "The Dancing Girl of Izu". He also drew the limited-edition cover of Base Ball Bear's single "Breeeeze Girl", which reuses an image from the JoJo manga.

  The March 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami damaged the Hiraizumi ruins, which were declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site that June. To raise awareness of the reconstruction, Araki drew artwork depicting them. At the end of July 2012, a "Hirohiko Araki JoJo Exhibition" opened in his native Sendai to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the series. In October it moved to Tokyo.

  In 2012 he drew the album cover for Sayuri Ishikawa's X -Cross-, on which she strikes one of the series' iconic poses and wears jewelry from the manga. He also drew the cover of the 2012 reprint of Tamaki Saitō's Lacan for Surviving, and the cover of a 2015 compilation album for the composer Akira Senju.

  On the 17th of April 2015, a book explaining Araki's method for creating manga was released in Japan. An English translation followed on the 6th of June 2017.

  A stage adaptation of his 1994 one-shot Under Execution, Under Jailbreak ran from the 20th to the 29th of November 2015 at the Galaxy Theatre. It then toured the country in December, and it also drew on his 1996 one-shot Dolce, and His Master.

  For the 2020 Tokyo Paralympics, Araki created an official poster titled The Sky above The Great Wave off the Coast of Kanagawa. It is heavily inspired by Hokusai's famous woodblock print The Great Wave off Kanagawa.

  On the 29th of July 2024, Araki unveiled The Fountain Boy, a public art display commissioned by JR West for Ōsaka Station. It is based on a fountain that stood until 2004, and it opened alongside the business complex Innogate Osaka.

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