Yusuke Murata: From Eyeshield 21 to One Punch Man

One Punch Man is the work that turned Yusuke Murata into one of the most-recognized commercial illustrators in contemporary manga. The series — which Murata illustrates from ONE’s original webcomic — has been running since 2012 on Shueisha’s Tonari no Young Jump digital platform, has passed 30 collected volumes, and is one of the most-followed digital manga in the world. The first season of the Madhouse anime adaptation, broadcast in 2015, is widely cited as one of the high points of 2010s shonen animation.

Murata’s career, however, did not begin with One Punch Man. He spent the 2000s as the illustrator-half of Eyeshield 21, the long-running American-football shonen written by Riichiro Inagaki. The career trajectory across both works is a study in what a manga illustrator can do when paired with a writer who handles narrative load, and what kinds of work become possible when the artistic specialization is separated from authorial responsibility.

The early career and Eyeshield 21

Murata was born in July 1978 in Sendai. He entered the Weekly Shonen Jump pipeline in his early twenties and won the magazine’s Tezuka Award in 1995 for a one-shot — an early signal of draftsmanship that the editorial system noticed quickly. He published one-shots through the late 1990s and early 2000s before being paired with writer Riichiro Inagaki for what would become Eyeshield 21.

Eyeshield 21 began serialization in Weekly Shonen Jump in July 2002 and ran until June 2009, concluding at 37 collected volumes. The premise — an American-football shonen with a small, fast protagonist as the team’s “Eyeshield” running back — was unusual for a Jump series. American football had no established cultural footprint in Japanese shonen at the time, and the work’s early arcs spent significant chapter space on rules-and-mechanics explanation.

What made the work commercially viable was the combination of Inagaki’s character-and-arc planning with Murata’s drawing density. The football action sequences in Eyeshield 21 are unusually detailed for weekly serialization — multi-panel breakdowns of plays, dynamic figure work in motion, and a willingness to spend full double-page spreads on critical moments. The Madhouse anime adaptation, which ran from 2005 to 2008, carried the franchise’s visual identity into broadcast television.

By the late 2000s Murata had established himself as a top-tier weekly illustrator — capable of producing 19 pages of dense action drawing every week for years without significant quality degradation. That reputation is what made the One Punch Man collaboration possible.

The One Punch Man redraw

The One Punch Man redraw began in June 2012 on Tonari no Young Jump. The structural setup is unusual: ONE’s original webcomic version had already established the work as an internet hit, with deliberately minimalist drawing that emphasized the joke of an overpowered protagonist. Murata’s role was to redraw ONE’s chapters in his own dense, action-heavy style while ONE continued to write new chapters of the original.

The model is unusual in mainstream manga. Most illustrators who collaborate with writers work on original material. Murata’s collaboration with ONE involves redrawing existing material — taking ONE’s webcomic chapters and reproducing them as commercial manga with substantially expanded artwork. The publication cadence on Tonari no Young Jump is less rigid than weekly print serialization, which lets Murata invest more time per chapter on individual panels.

The result is a body of work that operates as a showcase for what a commercial illustrator can do with extended time per page. The Saitama-versus-Boros sequence, the Garou arc’s extended action set pieces, and the Monster Association sequences are widely cited as among the most visually accomplished action manga of the 2010s. The redraws also drive substantial reader engagement on the digital platform — One Punch Man chapter releases are among Tonari no Young Jump’s largest traffic events.

The Madhouse anime and what followed

The Madhouse anime adaptation of One Punch Man, which aired in October-December 2015, is often cited as one of the best-animated shonen adaptations of the 2010s. The production carried over Murata’s visual density through key episodes and was structurally a showcase for what Japanese television animation could do when given a property with high source-material visual ceiling.

The second season, produced by J.C. Staff and aired in 2019, was widely characterized as a significant step down in production quality. The discourse around the season-2 production became a reference point for fan discussion of what happens when a hit property changes studios. A third season was confirmed in production through the late 2020s, with the staff and studio announcement watched closely by audiences who had compared the two earlier seasons.

The structural lesson from the One Punch Man adaptation history is that visually accomplished source material does not automatically translate to consistently accomplished animation. The studio decision matters. The budget and schedule matter. The continuity of key staff between seasons matters. Murata’s drawing density gives the franchise an unusually high visual ceiling, but realizing that ceiling depends on production decisions outside the manga itself.

The illustrator-and-writer model

Murata’s career is one of the cleanest examples of the illustrator-and-writer split as a sustainable career model. He has been an illustrator on every major work — Eyeshield 21 with Inagaki, One Punch Man with ONE — and has not pursued solo-authored long-form serialization. The choice has let him invest fully in drawing craft without the bandwidth cost of also being the writer.

The model has industry implications. The pairing of a strong writer with a strong illustrator can produce work neither would produce alone. Inagaki’s narrative discipline gave Eyeshield 21 its arc structure; Murata’s drawing gave it its visual identity. ONE’s premise gave One Punch Man its conceptual hook; Murata’s redraws gave it its commercial reach. Neither collaboration would have worked as solo authorship in the same form.

Murata also occasionally publishes original one-shots and short serials, including a Mountain Time experimental webcomic and Versus, a multi-writer collaborative project. These projects show his interest in different production models — the experimental, the collaborative, the structurally unusual — while keeping the long-form serialization weight on his collaborations with Inagaki and ONE.

Where the career sits in 2026

As of early 2026, One Punch Man continues to publish on Tonari no Young Jump at a less-than-weekly cadence. The anime third season is in production with a 2026 broadcast window. Murata’s commercial position is secure — he is one of the top-paid manga illustrators by collected-volume sales — and his structural model continues to influence how publishers think about writer-and-illustrator pairings.

The full One Punch Man encyclopedia entry, with current Arab-market licensing and TMDB credits, sits at One Punch Man. Murata’s career is best read as a demonstration of what becomes possible when a top-tier illustrator commits fully to the illustration role and lets a writer handle the narrative load. The output is more visually accomplished than solo authorship typically permits, and the model has aged better across two major works than most solo-author careers do over the same span.