Rui Takato

Rui Takato (高遠 るい; February 20, 1980) is a Japanese manga artist, illustrator, and light novelist. He graduated from the University of Tokyo's Faculty of Letters. He used to write doujinshi and commercial anthologies under the name Shitone.His PN comes from "one character each from people he admires (Hideaki Takatori and Masaaki Endo)" and "base," which his baseball-loving mother stopped trying to name him.

When he was around 20 years old, he brought his work to Shueisha's "Weekly Shonen Jump" magazine, but it was heavily criticized, and he realized that his style would not be easily accepted by the major publishers. Later, he met a doujin game artist at university and helped him draw pictures for him, which led to contacts at an editing production company, which accepted his game anthology manga, and he made a new debut as a manga artist. After working as a doujinshi manga artist in the early stages of his career, and after working on doujinshi and commercial anthologies, he made his first full-length serialization, "CYNTHIA_THE_MISSION," in 2003 in Ichijinsha's "Comic ZERO-SUM WARD" (later moved to "ComicREX Monthly"), where the anthology was published. He has since worked on the web, in magazines, and as a drawer. Since then, he has worked on a wide variety of projects, including short stories for websites, magazines, and new works, as well as comicalizations of games and novels, etc. Since 2007, he has been working on "Mikarun X" and "Devilman G" for "Champion Red" (Akita Shoten), and "Voice Slope" for which he not only wrote the manga but also the novel version and its illustrations. He also worked on the novel version of "Voice Slope" as well as its illustrations.
In 2020, "Hagure Idol Jigoken" was made into a live-action movie.

As seen in "Mikarun X," one of his representative works, he is interested in special effects heroes and monster movies. In his own commentary on "Mikarun X" and the short story "Micro Black Girl," he also talks about the strong influence of Sakyo Komatsu's science fiction novels.
The titles of the episodes of his works are often taken from anime/tokusatsu songs or voice-over songs.