Toshiyuki Araki (Japanese: 荒木 利之, Hepburn: Araki Toshiyuki; born June 7, 1960), better known as Hirohiko Araki (荒木 飛呂彦, Araki Hirohiko), is a Japanese manga artist. He is best known for his long-running series JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, which began publication in Weekly Shōnen Jump in 1987 and has over 120 million copies in circulation as of 2022, making it one of the best-selling manga series in history.

Araki grew up in Sendai, Japan with his parents and younger identical twin sisters. He cites his sisters' annoyances as the reason he spent time alone in his room reading manga, naming Ai to Makoto as the most important one to him. He supposes that his father's art books were his motive for drawing manga; he was particularly influenced by the work of French artist Paul Gauguin, as well as British and American rock stars including David Bowie and Prince.

After a school friend praised his manga, Araki began secretly drawing manga behind his parents' backs. He submitted his first work to a magazine in his first year of high school. All his submissions were rejected while other artists his age or younger were making successful debuts. He decided to go to the publishers' offices in Tokyo in person to find out why, taking his manga Poker Under Arms with him, which he stayed up all-night to finish. The Shueisha editor he met highly criticized the work, but said it had potential and told Araki to clean it up for the upcoming Tezuka Awards.

Araki left Miyagi University of Education before graduating, and made his debut under the name Toshiyuki Araki (荒木 利之, Araki Toshiyuki) in 1980 with the wild west one-shot Poker Under Arms, which was a "Selected Work" at that year's Tezuka Award. His first serialization was Cool Shock B.T. in 1983, about a young magician who solves mysteries. He began incorporating graphic violence into his work with Baoh in 1984. It tells the story of a man who is implanted with a parasite by an evil organization, giving him superhuman powers, and follows as he fights against them. Baoh was adapted into an OVA in 1989; the manga was released in the US by Viz Media in 1990 (in tankōbon form in 1995), but the OVA didn't get a stateside release until 2002. With The Gorgeous Irene in 1985, large, muscular characters became an emphasis of his art style, which would become more flamboyant throughout his later works.

His next series would become his magnum opus, 1987's JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. The series begins in 1880s England and follows Jonathan Joestar (nicknamed JoJo) and his adopted brother Dio Brando, who eventually tries to kill their father in order to obtain his share of inheritance. When confronted, Dio puts on an ancient mask that turns him into a vampire. Jonathan then learns a breathing technique named Hamon, which grants JoJo various powers to combat Dio. Subsequent arcs of JoJo follow the descendants of the Joestar family, and many are set in different parts of the world. The third and most popular arc, Stardust Crusaders, downplays the vampire story and Hamon technique, instead introducing a new power known as Stands, which remain the focus of the series today. Still being serialized almost 40 years later, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure has been adapted into numerous other forms of media and the manga had 120 million collected volumes in print by 2022. From 2011 to 2021, Araki produced JoJolion, the eighth story arc of the series, serialized in Ultra Jump magazine.

While not directly involved in the production of the internationally-popular TV adaptations by David Production and Warner Bros., Araki was an executive overseer and big-picture decision-maker, working to keep the adaptations faithful to the source material. The practical and conceptual difficulty of the original work required producer Hisataka Kasama to hire two directors with different skill sets, Naokatsu Tsuda and Kenichi Suzuki, to work collaboratively on the project. The anime adaptation for the seventh installment in the series, Steel Ball Run, was officially announced on April 12, 2025 at the JOJODAY event.

Influence

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure has directly inspired many pieces of global media, including the Japanese TCG and TV franchise Yu-Gi-Oh! and numerous American TV series, from Family Guy to Paw Patrol. JoJo's' characteristic iconography has become so pervasive that it has long embedded itself in international meme culture. After releasing the TV adaptations of the first two arcs in the series, the show's "To Be Continued" screens, scored by Yes' 1971 hit Roundabout, were parodied into virality through video sites like Youtube and Vine. The term "Jojo reference" has itself become a meme, both due to the heavy influence of the show in broad cultural spheres, as well as the bizarre and wide-ranging situations encountered by its characters.