Person: Amano Kozue

Info

Amano Kozue was born May 26, 1974 in Saitama Prefecture, Japan. She is a female manga artist widely known as the creator of Aria/Aqua, which proved to be a best-selling hit that was adapted into an anime television series consisting of three seasons and an OVA.

Like many of her colleagues Amano began working as a doujinshi artist. In 1993 she entered the Young Writers Contest held by Enix Publishing, using her real name (天野梢). She went on to win the main prize Dai Rookie-shou with her manga Aasu (アース). Following her win she was able to start a career as professional manga artist. Her first commercial work was Zen'yasai (前夜祭) which was published in Enix's Fresh Gangan magazine in 1994. Afterwards Amano changed the writing of her name to a hiragana variant instead of kanji.

More works for Enix followed. Between 1995 and 1998 her series Roman Club (浪漫倶楽部) was serialised in Shounen Gangan, and another series, Crescent Noise (クレセントノイズ), was serialised between 1998 and 2001 in G-Fantasy. In 2001 Amano created with Aqua a series about a young woman who becomes a gondolier on a future world reimagined and based on today's Venice. The series was running in the Stencil magazine and proved to be successful but was ended again after only 350 pages because Amano intended to switch the publisher.

She left Enix afterwards and started working for Mag-Garden. She continued Aqua there under the new name Aria in the Comic Blade magazine, where it was serialised between 2002 and 2008. The change of magazine did not affect the popularity of the series in any way and it continued to be as succesful as before. In 2005 an anime adaption for television was made, which was followed by two more series and an OVA.