Kentaro Yabuki

Kentaro Yabuki (矢吹 健太朗, Yabuki Kentarō, born February 4, 1980 in Kōchi) is a Japanese manga artist, best known for his series Black Cat. His mentor was Takeshi Obata, the illustrator of Death Note, Hikaru no Go and Bakuman.

Overview

Yabuki has stated that everything he learned about drawing manga, he learned from Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball. He even admitted that his first publication in Jump was not his own work but actually an illustration combining, or rather fusing together, Gohan and Trunks that he sent in to a 1995 contest and won a prize for.

Yabuki is best known for his series Black Cat which ran from 2000 to 2004 in Weekly Shōnen Jump and later adapted into an anime. Both were released in North America. Upon its ending, Yabuki expressed desire to make a sequel from the series, or make its characters reappear in another work. Since 2004, he has only been working as illustrator to works written by other authors, including the popular To Love-Ru -Trouble- alongside his former assistant Saki Hasemi.