Kazue Kato

• 1. Introduction

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  Kazue Kato was born on the 20th of July, 1980, in Tokyo, and by her teenage years she already had a clear goal: to become an animator. Her father had other ideas. Unconvinced she was serious enough, he sent her to college instead. She left. And rather than return to animation, she chose a different path entirely, one that would eventually produce a manga series whose seventh volume alone sold one million copies on its first print run.

  How does a young woman who wanted to draw cartoons for a living end up at the center of one of the most successful manga franchises in Japan? What pushed her toward manga instead of animation? And what did the editorial team at Jump Square see in her that made them seek her out directly? The answers reach from the pages of a girls' magazine called Ribon all the way to Godzilla.

• 2. The Road to a First Series

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  Kato's debut came in 2000 with a one-shot published in Akamaru Jump. A one-shot is a single-chapter story, a calling card for artists trying to break into serialization, and it was enough to get her foot in the door. Several more one-shots followed before she landed her first full serialized series.

  Robo to Usakichi ran in Monthly Shonen Sirius from 2005 to 2007. It was a complete run, modest in scale but significant as a proving ground. When the series finished, Kato did not have to go looking for her next project. The editorial department of Jump Square came to her.

• 3. Blue Exorcist Takes Shape

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  Serialization in Jump Square began on the 4th of April, 2009. The series Kato developed for that launch was Blue Exorcist, and it would go on to become the first manga in Jump Square's history to reach an initial print run of one million copies for a single volume. That milestone came with the seventh volume.

  By the first half of 2017, Blue Exorcist ranked as the eleventh best-selling manga in all of Japan. The series drew adaptations across multiple formats, including an anime that ran for five seasons and a theatrical film. Kato had arrived not just as a working manga artist but as one whose work now moved across entire entertainment industries.

• 4. Influences and Inspirations

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  Kato has pointed to the shojo manga magazine Ribon as one of the early forces that pushed her toward a career in manga. Ribon is aimed at young girls and features work from a broad range of authors, and Kato has credited the variety of storytelling she encountered there as a genuine motivator.

  She also named Gosho Aoyama's Yaiba and the works of Katsuhiro Otomo among her formative reads. Perhaps the most specific influence she has cited, though, is Kentaro Miura's Berserk. Kato has identified it as a major force on her own work, and she pointed in particular to the triangular relationship between the characters Guts, Griffith, and Casca as something that shaped how she approaches character dynamics.

• 5. Beyond the Page

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  In 2020, Kato stepped outside manga entirely to take on character design work for Godzilla Singular Point, a television series. It was a different discipline from serialized manga, and it reflected a range that her early aspirations toward animation had perhaps always pointed toward.

  In July 2021, she announced that Blue Exorcist would go on hiatus. The reason was a new project: a manga adaptation of Fuyumi Ono's Eizen Karukaya Kaiitan novel series, which ran in Jump Square through 2022. Ono is a novelist whose work has generated multiple major adaptations over the years, and Kato's choice to step away from her flagship series in order to bring that material to the page says something about where her creative priorities sat at that moment.