Ryoichi Ikegami (池上 遼一) is a Japanese manga artist that usually works as the illustrator in collaboration with a writer. He is best known for Crying Freeman (1986–1988), written by Kazuo Koike, and Heat (1999–2004), written by Buronson. The latter won the 2001 Shogakukan Manga Award for general manga. Ikegami received the Fauves d'Honneur at the 2023 Angoulême International Comics Festival. Yoshihide Fujiwara is a former assistant of Ikegami's.

Career

After graduating from junior high school, Ikegami moved to Osaka and drew manga while working as a billboard sign painter, debuting at the age of 17 writing rental comics. In 1966, he published a story called Tsumi no Ishiki (罪の意識) in the gekiga magazine Garo that caught the eye of fellow Garo contributor, Shigeru Mizuki, who offered him a job as his assistant. Ikegami accepted and moved to Tokyo where he worked as Mizuki's assistant for two and a half years. From a young age Ikegami had admired Takao Saito and Yoshiharu Tsuge, so he was delighted to work with Tsuge as Mizuki's assistant. Ikegami is also a fan of American comics, particularly Neal Adams. Ikegami has worked on several popular series, such as Mai, the Psychic Girl with writer Kazuya Kudo, Crying Freeman, with writer Kazuo Koike, as well as Sanctuary and Heat with writer Sho Fumimura. He also wrote and drew Spider-Man: The Manga, a manga version of Spider-Man and collaborated with Garon Tsuchiya for the manga Box. In 2001, he won the Shogakukan Manga Award for general manga as the artist of Heat. He became a professor at Osaka University of Arts in 2005. From 2016 to 2020, he and Sho Fumimura created Begin in Big Comic Superior. Ikegami teamed up with writer Richard Woo for M no Shirushi -MacArthur Ansatsu Keikaku- (2020) for Big Comic Superior. It tells the story of a plot to assassinate Douglas MacArthur. A character called Kēichi Kurata (played by Masataka Kubota) in the TV-drama GeGeGe no Nyōbō is modeled after him. He did a collaboration manga for the anime Girls und Panzer.

Selected works