Assassination Classroom, Vol. 12

Yusei Matsui was born in 1986 in Saitama Prefecture, Japan, and knew from childhood that he wanted to make manga. He made his professional debut in Weekly Shōnen Jump in 2005 with Neuro: Supernatural Detective, a darkly inventive series featuring a demon from the underworld who feeds on mysteries and uses a hapless human girl as his cover story. The series ran for four years and earned Matsui a reputation for combining genuinely clever puzzle plotting with an irreverent, often grotesque sense of humour — qualities that would define everything he made thereafter.

His second major series, Assassination Classroom, began in Weekly Shōnen Jump in 2012 and ran until 2016, becoming one of the most beloved shonen manga of its decade. The premise is absurdist on its face: a tentacled creature with a permanent smile has destroyed most of the moon, announces his intention to destroy the Earth within the year, and offers to spend the intervening time teaching a class of underperforming junior high students — who are simultaneously tasked by the government with assassinating him before his deadline. What sounds like pure comedy reveals itself, volume by volume, to be something far more moving: a story about education, about what it means to believe in someone's potential, and about the particular grief of students who feel the world has already written them off.

Matsui's achievement with Assassination Classroom lies precisely in this gap between the absurdity of the premise and the emotional seriousness of what he does with it. Korosensei — the tentacled teacher, whose name is a pun on the Japanese for both 'unkillable teacher' and 'teacher of murder' — became one of manga's great characters: terrifying and tender in equal measure, pedagogically brilliant, and ultimately heartbreaking. The series won the 59th Shogakukan Manga Award for Shōnen, was adapted into an anime series that ran from 2015 to 2016, and was turned into two live-action films. It continues to attract new readers.

Matsui has spoken in interviews about his deep interest in teaching as a subject — his own experience of being an underestimated student shaped Assassination Classroom's central premise. He is known for meticulous planning, having plotted the entire series before beginning serialization, and for a work ethic characteristic of the demanding world of weekly manga production. After Assassination Classroom's conclusion, he contributed to various anthologies and projects while readers awaited his next long-form work. His influence on shonen manga's approach to ensemble character work and to treating young readers as emotionally sophisticated is considerable.