Masashi Tanaka
Japanese mangaka

Masashi Tanaka (田中 政志, born June 10, 1962) is a Japanese manga artist best known for creating Gon, a silent manga starring a miniature dinosaur.
Biography
Masashi Tanaka was born in Gōtsu, Shimane. He graduated from the Osaka University of Arts in 1985 and published his first manga while still in school. That year he won the Grand Prize in the Kodansha Tetsuya Chiba Awards and moved to Tokyo. He began publishing Gon, his best-known manga, in 1991. Gon won multiple awards in 1998, including the Excellence Award in the Manga division at the second Japan Media Arts Festival in 1998, the Eisner Award for Best U.S. Edition of Foreign Material and Best Humor Publication at the Eisner Awards, and the award for Best French Edition of Foreign Material at the 1998 Manga Festival in France.
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This entry incorporates text from “Masashi Tanaka” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.