Hirohiko Araki (Japanese: 荒木 飛呂彦, Hepburn: Araki Hirohiko, born June 7, 1960) is a Japanese manga artist. He made his debut in 1980 with the one-shot Poker Under Arms, and began his professional career with the short series Cool Shock B.T., Baoh, and The Gorgeous Irene. Araki is best known for his long-running ongoing series JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, which was first published in Weekly Shōnen Jump in 1987 and has to date sold over 100 million copies in Japan alone. The series is known for frequent references to Western rock music, fashion, and Italy, all of which Araki is reportedly very fond of.
Araki grew up in Sendai, Japan with his parents and younger identical twin sisters. He cites his sisters' annoyances as the reason he spent time alone in his room reading manga, naming Ai to Makoto as the most important one to him, and his father's art books, he supposes this was his motive for drawing manga. He was particularly influenced by the work of French artist Paul Gauguin. After a school friend praised his manga, he began secretly drawing manga behind his parent's backs. He submitted his first work to a magazine in his first year of high school. All his submissions were rejected while other artists his age or younger were making successful debuts. He decided to go to the publishers' offices in Tokyo to find out why in person, taking a manga he stayed up all-night to finish. The Shueisha editor he met highly criticized the work, but said it had potential and to clean it up for the upcoming Tezuka Awards. The manga was Poker Under Arms.