Minagawa, Ryouji

Ryouji Minagawa is a Japanese manga artist born in Sumida, Tokyo.

He was invited with Spriggan story writer Hiroshi Takashige. to go to a comic convention in Portugal in 1996 as a guest of honor due to his work on Spriggan.

He made his manga debut with HEAVEN in 1988. From 1991 to 1996, he worked on the 11 volumes of Spriggan with Hiroshi Takashige. His work had brought him fame across North America and Europe. After Spriggan, he went on to do Kyo in 1996, followed by the creation of ARMS with Kyoichi Nanatsuki, from 1997 to 2002.

In 1999, he received the 44th Shogakukan Manga Awards in the shounen category for ARMS. In 2003, he created D-Live!!. He has compiled five one-shots on an single volume called Tensousha: Minagawa Ryouji Tanpenshuu. Recently Ryouji finished his works Peace Maker, Adamas and Kaiou Dante. He also worked with numerous manga authors on short stories for the Neo Kiseijuu collection.

He said in an interview that he was inspired to be a manga artist when he watched films made by George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg.

In addition to manga, Ryouji has also worked as a character designer on several video games titles. In 1994, Ryouji along side with Yoshihide Fujiwara, Yoshinori Kobayashi, Osamu Ishiwata, Yumi Tamura, Gosho Aoyama and Kazuhiko Shimamoto, worked on the characters design for the JRPG Live-A-Live. In 1996 did the characters design for the fighting game Genei Tougi: Shadow Struggle and its sequel, Critical Blow, in 1997; In 2005 did the characters design for the third-person shooter video game 10,000 Bullets (Tsukiyo ni Saraba).

Ryouji also worked on some characters models for Tekken 5, Tekken 6 and Tekken Tag Tournament 2.