Asian Pop Profiles Mamoru Nagano Introducing the genius behind NewType Magazine's longest running manga serial...

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Check out Nagano-san's POV in his essays on the Toyspress website!!!

Certified Mac Addict Mamoru Nagano was born in Kyoto back in 1960. He got his start as a mecha designer for Gundam creator Yoshiyuki Tomino at the Nippon Sunrise Agency during the 1980s.  His chef d'ouvre at Sunrise was a television series called Heavy Metal L-Gaim which became the basis of much of his present projects. While working for Sunrise, he was already working on a short manga serial for Kadokawa Shouten called Fool for the City which was released in tankoubon form in 1986.  Knowing talent when they saw it, the editorial board of Kadokawa Shouten decided to give him some space in the then-fledgling moving pictures monthly magazine NewType in late 1986.

Since its debut in the pages of NewType, Mamoru Nagano's The Five Star Stories have grown in fame beyond Japanese borders, prompting the release of an English-language translation in the first quarter of 1999 exclusively distributed by Kinokuniya Bookstores in the United States. As of 09 December 2000, a media poll conducted by the Asahi Shimbun media agency on Japan's best manga series came out with The Five Star Stories still on top even after nearly fourteen years of serialization. Even as he works on FSS, Nagano-san has found time for his wife, seiyuu Maria Kawamura, and for a number of other projects for Toyspress.  He has been instrumental in the design of a number of model kits produced in relation to the FSS. On the side, he spent a better part of 1999 and 2000 illustrating the two-volume manga Schell Bullet, a collaborative effort with anime wunderkind Kunihiko Ikuhara. Nagano-san's most recent project has been Knight Flags, the most recent installment of the FSS. He currently serves as vice-president of Toyspress, Inc.