Makoto Yukimura was born in 1976 in Yokohama, Japan, and was first inspired by the idea of drawing manga in elementary school, when he encountered Buronson and Tetsuo Hara’s famous Fist of the North Star. While attending college, Yukimura learned manga technique and storytelling by working as an assistant to artist Shin Morimura, a onetime collaborator with Garon Tsuchiya (Oldboy).
Planetes was Makoto Yukimura’s professional debut at age 22; before being collected to graphic novel, the story was serialized in Kodansha’s prestigious weekly manga magazine Comic Morning, also home to What’s Michael? as well as titles such as Vagabond and Drops of God. Both the manga and anime adaptation of Planetes won Japan’s Seiun Award for science fiction, a feat that had not been achieved since Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.
In 2005, Yukimura began his ongoing manga epic Vinland Saga, published in English by Kodansha, which in 2009 would be awarded the Grand Prize for Manga by the Japan Media Arts Festival, an official event of the national Agency for Cultural Affairs. Vinland Saga has been adapted into a two-season anime series streaming on Amazon and Netflix, winning the 4th Crunchyroll Anime Awards for Best Drama in 2020.
