Mashima, Hiro

Blood type: O
Hometown: Nagano, Nagano Prefecture, Japan

Twitter: @hiro_mashima
YouTube: mashimaCh

A Japanese manga artist recognized for his fantasy manga Rave Master, Fairy Tail and Edens Zero.

He was a notable guest at the 2008 San Diego Comic-Con. He won the Kodansha Manga Award for shōnen manga in 2009. He was also given the Harvey Awards International Spotlight award in 2017 and the Fauve Special Award at the 2018 Angoulême International Comics Festival.

Hiro Mashima grew up in the Nagano prefecture of Japan. When he was young, he dreamed of becoming an artist, particularly one who dealt with manga. His passion for drawing encouraged his grandfather to search for discarded manga for him to read and trace pictures with.

Two manga series in particular were the main inspiration for him to become a professional manga artist: Dragon Ball, a well known manga produced by Akira Toriyama, and Ultimate Muscle, created by Yudetamago. Hiro Mashima especially enjoyed parts featuring the main characters getting into trouble, but somehow always managing to win in the end. He also liked the fierceness depicted in battle scenes and this later encouraged him to incorporate his own style of fierceness into his works.

After high school, he decided to further pursue his dream career, so he attended an art school which specialized in teaching manga artists. He believed this would help him in learning how to improve his manga drawing ability. However, he ended up detesting the approach, and left without completing the studies. He stated that while it taught him the basics, he felt it would not help as a professional. In the end, he decided to teach himself.

Around the year 1998, Hiro Mashima had created a 60 page original work called Magician that he took to editors to review. Soon afterward, it won him the amateur manga artists' competition. He made his official serialization debut the following year with Rave Master.

Hiro Mashima's drawing speed and production of manga is actually quite well known among those within the manga community. A typical workload for a Weekly Shōnen Magazine manga artist (him included) may be about 20 pages of completed draft, 20 pages of rough drafts, and maybe a colored page. However, this was also the point in time when he was producing a monthly manga called Monster Soul, for which he had illustrated 43 pages of completed drafts, 69 pages of rough drafts, and 4 full-colored pages in a single week. His record is 65 completed pages (3 of which were colored) within one week.

He has never served as an artist's assistant.

(Source: Fairy Tail Wiki)