Takehiko Inoue is a Japanese manga artist. He is best known for the basketball series Slam Dunk, which is one of the best-selling manga series in history, and the samurai manga Vagabond. Many of his works are about basketball, Inoue himself being a huge fan of the sport. His works sold in North America through Viz Media are Slam Dunk, Vagabond and Real, although Slam Dunk was earlier translated by Gutsoon! Entertainment. In 2012, Inoue became the first recipient of the Cultural Prize at the Asia Cosmopolitan Awards.
Before his debut, Inoue was an assistant to Tsukasa Houjou on City Hunter. He made his debut in 1988, when Purple Kaede appeared in Weekly Shounen Jump magazine. It won the 35th annual Tezuka Award. His first serialization was in 1989 with Chameleon Jail, for which he was the illustrator of a story written by Kazuhiko Watanabe.
Inoue's first real fame came with his next manga, Slam Dunk, about a basketball team from Shohoku High School. It was published in Weekly Shounen Jump from 1990 to 1996 and has sold over 120 million copies in Japan alone. In 1995 it received the 40th annual Shogakukan Manga Award for shounen manga and in 2007 was declared Japan's favorite manga. The series was also adapted into a 101 episode anime television series and five movies.
Inoue launched Buzzer Beater as an online comic in May 1996. It is about a basketball team from Earth that attempts to compete on the intergalactic level, it appears on his official web site in four languages: Japanese, English, Chinese, and Korean. Buzzer Beater beater got two 13-episode anime adaptations in and in .