Hideshi Hino

Hideshi Hino (日野日出志, born April 19, 1946) is one of the founding fathers of horror manga. Hino was born in 1946 in Chichihar (formerly Manchuria), China, during the waning days of WWII, and he often brought up the fleeing of Japanese occupants during the end of he war in his manga. He loved gag comics from an early age, wishing he could be on par Fujio Akatsuka's (“Osomatsu-Kun”) work. After graduating from high school, he continued to draw manga and he made his professional debut in 1967 when his story "Tsumetai Sweat" was selected for the 5th Monthly New Comer Award in the October issue of "COM" (a short lived comics anthology from Osamu Tezuka)..

Over the decades Hino has honed his craft as a horror manga author, garnering fans around the world. In 1983, he released what many people consider to be his masterpiece "Panorama of Hell" for "Hibari Comics" (Hibari Shobo), and was one of the first horror manga released in the US when Blast Books published it in English in 1990. Many of Hino’s stories are from the perspective of either children or outsider artists, generally people looked down on by polite society. Through this he crafts a dream-like world of horrors that is simultaneously disarmingly simplistic, but also grotesquely graphic. Hino also dabbled in film, lending his talent to the infamous horror films “Guinea Pig 2: Flower of Flesh and Blood” and “Guinea Pig: Mermaid in a Manhole”. “Flower of Flesh and Blood” was so graphic that an FBI investigation was launched after Charlie Sheen saw the film at a party and thought it was an actual snuff film. After that, he shifted his activities to manga magazines and published numerous horror and bizarre works. In addition to manga, he also produces picture books, children's books, and is an avid practitioner of bushido.