Naoki Urasawa is a Japanese manga artist and musician. He has been drawing manga since he was four years old, and for most of his professional career has created two series simultaneously. The stories to many of these were co-written in collaboration with his former editor, Takashi Nagasaki. Urasawa has been called one of the artists that changed the history of manga and has won numerous awards, including the Shogakukan Manga Award three times, the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize twice, and the Kodansha Manga Award once. South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho called him "the greatest storyteller of our time", while Dominican-American writer Junot Díaz proclaimed Urasawa to be a national treasure in Japan. By December 2021, his various works had over 140 million copies in circulation worldwide, making him one of the best-selling authors of all time.

A manga artist, also known as a mangaka, is a comic artist who writes and/or illustrates manga. As of 2006, about 3,000 professional manga artists were working in Japan.