Kazue Kato was born on July 20, 1980, in Tokyo.[1][2] She has two younger siblings, a brother and a sister.[3] In high school, she had aspirations to be an animator. However, her dad did not feel she was serious enough about it, so he sent her to college.[3] However, she left college and decided to become a manga artist instead.[3] After publishing several one-shots, she made her first full series, Robo to Usakichi. It was serialized in Monthly Shōnen Sirius from 2005 to 2007.[2]
Following Robo to Usakichi's completion, she was approached by the editorial department of Jump Square to serialize a manga in the magazine.[3] She eventually developed Blue Exorcist, which started serialization in Jump Square on April 4, 2009.[4] The seventh volume of the series had an initial print run of one million copies; the series was the first manga in Jump Square to achieve such a feat.[5] In the first half of 2017, the series was the eleventh best selling manga in Japan.[6] The series has also been given numerous adaptations, including an anime series that ran for two seasons[7][8] and a film.[9]
In 2020, she did the character designs for the Godzilla Singular Point television series.[10] In July 2021, she announced Blue Exorcist would be put on hiatus so she could launch a manga adaptation of Fuyumi Ono's Eizen Karukaya Kaiitan novel series.[11]
Influences
Kato has mentioned that the various authors and stories from the shōjo manga magazine Ribon were one of her early influences that motivated her to begin her career as a manga artist. She also mentioned Gosho Aoyama's Yaiba and the works of Katsuhiro Otomo.[12] Kato has cited Kentaro Miura's Berserk as a major influence over her work, specifically the relationship between Guts, Griffith, and Casca.[13]
