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Suzue Miuchi

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Suzue Miuchi (美内 すずえ Miuchi Suzue, born February 20 1951) is a mangaka and author of long running shōjo manga Glass Mask. She was born in Nishinomiya, Japan and grew up in Osaka. She also the winner of the Kodansha Manga Award (1982) and the Japan Cartoonists Association Award (1995). According to interviews in which Miuchi tells about herself, her enthusiasm toward manga dates back to her early childhood. She was such a frequent goer to a nearby rental comicbook shop that the owner of the shop allowed her to pay the rental charge by "monthly credit" when she was a kindergartener. She began drawing manga by herself at the age of 10. Miuchi's professional career started when her study work won the top award in the "manga school" section of Bessatsu Margaret (one of the most major monthly shoujo manga magazines at the time) during her attendance to Osaka Seikei High School, and it appeared in the magazine as the debut work in 1967. In a couple of years, her works gradually earned increasing popularity in the readership of the magazine.

Miuchi's earliest smashing hits are Akai Megami (The Red Goddess) and Moeru Niji (The Burning Rainbow) that appeared in 1970, and the success of these works put Miuchi into the position of a pioneer of the new frontiers of shoujo manga. With her works in the early 1970s namely 13-Gatsu no Higeki (The Tragedy of the 13th Month), Harukanaru Kaze to Hikari (The Far Wind and Light), Majo Media (Media the Witch) etc., she earned a high reputation as one of the most popular manga artists during the period before the boom of "The Fabulous Forty-Niners" ('hana no 24-nen-gumi', referring to a group of shoujo manga artists who initiated the revolutionary movement of this field with a new and highly sophisticated style, including Moto HAGIO, Yumiko OHSHIMA and Keiko TAKEMIYA) of the mid 1970s.

Throughtout the 1970s (as well as during the 80s) Miuchi has created various kinds of shojo comics ranging from high school comedies to adventure and romances with historical settings. In particular, she had been known as a master hand of the mystery horror/occult manga by the mid-1970s; Miuchi's best known work in this field would be Shiroi Kageboushi (The White Silhouette).

In December 1975, Miuchi started Garasu no Kamen (The Glass Mask) which is regarded as her representative work today. Although the core shoujo manga fandom at the time viewed this series blatantly conservative and obsolete, its popularity turned out to be sensational and has gained a huge mass of admirers while its run for more than 20 years. Miuchi is now a big-name shoujo manga artist with the fact that Garasu no Kamen is still attracting a new generation of fans, while the long-time fans are eagerly waiting for the conclusion and ending of this masterpiece.

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