Gosho Aoyama made his debut in 1986 with Chotto Mattete (Wait a Minute), which won Shogakukan's prestigious Shinjin Comic Taisho (Newcomer's Award for Comics) and launched his career as a critically acclaimed, top-selling manga artist. In addition to Case Closed, which won the Shogakukan Manga Award in 2001, Aoyama created the popular manga Yaiba: Samurai Legend, which won the Shogakukan Manga Award in 1992. Aoyama's manga is greatly influenced by his boyhood love for mystery, adventure, and baseball, and he has cited the tales of Arsène Lupin and Sherlock Holmes, along with the samurai films of Akira Kurosawa, as some of his childhood favorites.
