Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! Volume 8

Sumito Oowara was born in 1993 in Kanagawa prefecture in Japan. His father's agricultural school background and involvement in Scouting gave him an interest in nature as a child. Oowara's parents and older sister both drew, and encouraged his own drawing from an early age. As a young student he was bullied because of his learning difficulties in math and kanji, to the extent he avoided attending classes--until he decided to use his drawing skill as a "means of self-defense," to assert a place for himself among his peers.

A member of his film club in high school, Oowara originally drew Eizouken as an amateur manga (doujinshi). Scouted by Japanese manga publisher Shogakukan at the self-publishing convention Comitia (also where Trigun's Yasuhiro Nightow began his career), Oowara developed Eizouken into a full-length manga series, making his professional debut in Monthly Big Comic Spirits magazine in 2016.