Japanese manga comic strip artist Boichi Terasawa, who was famous for his science fiction work “Cobra,” and for being a pioneer in creating manga on computers, died at the age of 68, due to a myocardial infarction, as his studio announced, the day before yesterday.
His production company, “Terasawa Productions,” explained through its account on the “X” social network that he died last Friday. “Despite undergoing three surgeries for brain tumors, Boichi Terasawa lived as vividly as a Cobra himself, but this time he seems to have been caught off guard,” she wrote.
Born in 1955 on the northern island of Hokkaido, Boichi Terasawa began his career with shoujo manga intended for girls and teenagers, before moving to Tokyo in 1976 to study with Osamu Tezuka, who is considered the pioneer of modern manga.
His most famous novel, “Cobra,” began to be published in 1978 in the Weekly Shonen Jump magazine, and deals with a space adventurer whose left arm conceals a “Psycho Gun” rifle.
Terasawa, who was passionate about cinema, made the hero of his novels, who wanders the galaxy with the features of French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo.
“Cobra” has sold about 50 million copies all over the world, according to the specialized “Mangazinkan” website, and an cartoon and an animated film were adapted from it.
In the early 1980s, Terasawa began creating works on computers, most notably “The Black Knight Bat” (1985), and then in 1992 “Takeru,” which is considered the first manga in the world to be created entirely on computers.
