Inoue Takehiko

Inoue Takehiko was born on January 12, 1967 in Kagoshima Prefecture. He was a big Basketball fan and was a player himself in his high school years. In 1988, Inoue won the Tezuka Award for "Kaede Purple" (Purple Maple) which deals with the history of basketball. After that, he decided to transfer to Tokyo and worked as an assistant of Tsukasa Hojo for 10 months when he was working on "City Hunter".

His most famous work "Slam Dunk", where he was dubbed as "Dr. T" because of his self-insert as the one explaining the mechanics of basketball, sold around 2 million copies only in Japan and about 100 million copies worldwide. This soon made him one of the most famous and better paid manga authors of Japan, so much that he was able to acquire the rights to the publication of his work (through the company/signature I.T. Planning), clearing it from Shueisha.

After finishing Slam Dunk in 1996, he experimented on making his own online manga "Buzzer Beater", another basketball manga in an inter-galactic setting, which was also serialized in Shounen Jump until 1998. It was then followed with the series "Vagabond", which won Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs Manga Festival Price in the year 2000 for his depiction of Musashi Miyamoto and he also won the 24th Kodansha Manga Prize in the same year. "Real", yet another basketball manga only this time deals with players with disability, sold more than a million copies when it's first volume was published in 2001.

Source: Dr. T's Prescription: An Inoue Takehiko Fanlisting

Official Site: Takehiko on the Web