Usamaru Furuya

Usamaru Furuya (古屋 兎丸, Furuya Usamaru, born January 25, 1968) is a Japanese manga artist. During elementary school, Furuya enrolled in the Osamu Tezuka Manga Correspondence Course and by the time he reached high school he had discovered a darker, more underground style.

He graduated from Tama Art University, where he majored in oil painting and developed an interest in sculpting and Butoh dance. During college his work evolved from figurative to eventually dealing more with abstract shapes.

In 1994, Furuya published his debut series Palepoli in the renowned alternative manga magazine Garo. After graduating from college, he initially planned to work as a full-time artist while doing illustrations on the side, but his success in manga shifted his focus. Soon after, he published the gag manga Short Cuts in the mainstream seinen manga magazine Weekly Young Sunday.

He was a regular contributor to the alternative manga magazine Manga Erotics F from its beginnings in 2001 on. For this magazine he created the manga Lychee Light Club, based on a stage play, about a group of middle school boys aiming to build an AI with cruel tactics has been adapted into a TV anime series.

Otherwise, since the 2000s, he has published in mainstream seinen and shōnen manga magazines of different publishers like Kodansha, Shogakukan, Shueisha and Shinchosha, but also drew a yonkoma series for the daily newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun and made a manga biography about Emperor Akihito's life for the weekly magazine Shūkan Post.