Itaru Kinoshita

Itaru Kinoshita
木下いたる
NationalityJapan
Area(s)Animal manga
Notable works

Itaru Kinoshita (木下 いたる) is a Japanese manga artist. His career started with the dinosaur focused manga Giganto o ute (Attack the Gigante). His series Dinosan has been in serialization since 2021 with Shinchosha. And since 2022, the English edition has been published by Seven Seas Entertainment as Dinosaur Sanctuary.

Career

During elementary school Itaru used to help take care of chickens, sheep, and pigs. He has also stated that he has liked dinosaurs since childhood.

Since his early school days, he liked to draw which led him to continue his education at an art high school. However, when graduation approached, he had no desire to pursue art academically and lacked any particular goal. Inspired by a brochure for a language school given to him by his parents, he decided to go to the USA after graduating high school to study film, especially Hollywood films.[1] However, even after moving to the USA, he found it difficult to find a job in the film industry, so he contacted make-up artist AKIHITO and animation artist Daisuke Tsutsumi for advice.

After consulting with AKIHITO and Daisuke Tsutsumi, Itaru realized that his own goals were still vague and began thinking that it would be better to make a living doing something that he enjoyed doing. He had already started writing comics while they in the US and gradually shifted his career from film to comics.[2] Later, around 2011, Itaru worked in Palau as a start-up staff member of a Japanese restaurant. The flat Kinoshita was living in at the time was adjacent to a forest and the strange animal noises coming from the forest at night inspired him to create a manga about dinosaurs; specifically about breeding and taking care of dinosaurs which he thought was not well depicted in the film franchise Jurassic Park[2]

After returning to Japan, Itaru worked at a movie theater to make an income while trying to become a manga artist and won several manga awards. However, his proposals were repeatedly unsuccessful and rejected. He has said that this was a very rough period for him. He also found it difficult to incorporate dinosaurs into his stories, and his projects did not progress smoothly. Itaru made a plan to give up if he could not serialize his work by the time he turned thirty years old, and had his sights set on a job. However just before he turned thirty, he saw signs of his first serialization and continued as a manga artist.[2] In June 2018 Kodansha's COMIC DAYS serialized Itaru Kinoshita's dinosaur panic action manga set in the Edo period titled Giganto o ute.[3] The first tankōbon volume was released in November of the same year.[4]

After the serialization of Giganto o ute ended, he created a manga about dinosaurs and their breeding that he had originally envisioned while working in Palau. Thus the world of Dinosaur Sanctuary was created thanks to Shinchosha, which began its serialization in their monthly manga magazine Comic Bunch,[1] from March 2021[2]—and digitally since 2024 on their online platform Comic Bunch Kai—with the physical publication of volume 1 in tankōbon format seeing a September release of the same year.[3]

Works

  • Dinosan ehon kyoryuen e iko (Dinosaur Sanctuary Picture Book: Let’s Go to the Dinosaur Park), Shinchosha, 2025.

Serialized

  • Giganto o ute (Attack the Gigante), Kodansha, 2018–2019, 3 vols.
  • Dinosan (Dinosaur Sanctuary), Shinchosha, 2021–ongoing. (Also published in English, Basque, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Chinese, Thai, and Vietnamese)

Citations

  1. ^ a b "恐竜が絶滅しなかった世界を舞台に1人の新人飼育員を描く新連載、バンチで始動". コミックナタリー. ナターシャ. 2021-03-19. Retrieved 2021-10-04.
  2. ^ a b c d "異色デビューの漫画家が描く、現代の「恐竜の飼育員」たちの働き方＜マンガ＞". bizSPA!フレッシュ. 扶桑社. 2021-09-18. Retrieved 2021-10-04.
  3. ^ a b "2021年の江ノ島、恐竜の飼育員になった娘を描く「ディノサン」1巻". コミックナタリー. ナターシャ. 2021-09-09. Retrieved 2021-10-04.
  4. ^ 安田峰俊 (2021-10-04). "恐竜研究者が熱弁、リアルな復元に必要なのは「肋骨への愛」だ！". 文春オンライン. 文藝春秋. Retrieved 2021-10-04.
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