Tetsuo Hara

Although born in Tokyo, Hara lived in Matsubara-danchi in Sōka, Saitama. He is a cousin of comedian Ryo Fukawa. Hara began drawing characters from Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy and Jungle Emperor Leo, as well as Ikki Kajiwara and Naoki Tsuji's Tiger Mask in first and second grade. In third and fourth grade he was obsessed with Shotaro Ishinomori's Kamen Rider manga, while the work of Fujio Akatsuka showed him how diverse the medium could be.

Hara had decided to become a manga artist by second and third grade. In middle school he read manga about becoming one, as well as autobiographical manga, and studied yonkoma to improve his sequencing. He then entered the design program at his high school, joined the "manga gekiga club," and submitted entries to manga competitions run by magazines. Hara also found inspiration by visiting the workplace of Osamu Akimoto, who was an alumnus of his high school.

When Hara approached Weekly Shōnen Jump about becoming a professional manga artist, editor Nobuhiko Horie liked his detailed artwork but noticed his poor story writing skills. Hara began working as an assistant to Yoshihiro Takahashi and enrolled in Gekiga Sonjuku, a manga school founded by Kazuo Koike, in 1981. He published several one-shots in 1982; "Mad Fighter" published in Fresh Jump in August, "Crash Hero" published in Weekly Shōnen Jump, and the boxing story "Super Challenger", which won first place at the 33rd Fresh Jump Prize. His first serialized work in Weekly Shōnen Jump was Iron Don Quixote, a motocross manga which lasted only ten weeks. Horie later claimed that the senior editor was willing to let Hara continue the series, but Horie chose to end it because he was confident the artist could do better. Hara then achieved fame with the publication of Fist of the North Star in 1983, which he co-created with Buronson. Ending in 1988, it spawned a massive franchise and went on to become one of the best-selling manga in history with over 100 million copies in circulation. His next long-running serial was The Magnificent Bastard: The Legend of Keiji, a period piece published in Weekly Shōnen Jump from 1990 to 1993 and loosely based on a novel by Keiichiro Ryu. It was through Kazuhiko Torishima that Hara received the offer from Capcom to create the character designs for the 1993 video game Saturday Night Slam Masters. In 1998, Hara reunited with Horie, whom he had not worked with since Fist of the North Star, to create Kōkenryoku Ōryō Sōsakan Nakabō Rintarō. The artist stated that the editor-in-chief at Shueisha had warned him to stay away from Horie because he held "no status" at the company. Hara was bewildered as to what office politics had to do with creating manga, and he and Horie both left Shueisha after Kōkenryoku Ōryō Sōsakan Nakabō Rintarō ended in 2000.

Hara, Horie and others then founded the publishing company Coamix that same year, and launched the manga magazine Weekly Comic Bunch in 2001. Hara serialized Fist of the Blue Sky, a prequel to Fist of the North Star, in Weekly Comic Bunch from 2001 until the magazine's final issue in 2010. Originally published weekly, the manga changed to a semi-regular schedule after Hara was diagnosed with keratoconus. Despite previously announcing his intentions to retire after completing Fist of the Blue Sky, Hara went on to create Ikusa no Ko: The Legend of Nobunaga Oda, written by Seibo Kitahara and published in Monthly Comic Zenon from 2010 to 2022. An English edition of Ikusa no Ko was concurrently published on the official Silent Manga Audition Community website. In 2021, Hara said that rather than creating work on his own, he was more interested in working with younger artists to create works as a team and pass on his forty years of experience.