You'd expect more bugs to be flying out of his head...
Shinya Murata (村田真哉, born May 25, 1983) is a Japanese mangaka based in Yokohama.Debuted with Jackals for the Gangan POWERED magazine and is known for writing Fighting Series with Animal Motifs and colorful casts of deranged people in other magazines published by Square Enix.
In 2012 he married Sato, the author of Living Dead! and Fragtime.
Works by Shinya Murata:
- Jackals (2005-2008)
- Arachnid (2009-2015)
- Caterpillar (2012-2018)
- Vaian Maiden (2013, discontinued)
- Killing Bites (2014, ongoing)
- Majo ni Ataeru Tettsui (2014-2015)
- Himenospia (2017-2021)
- Choubu no Shinobi (2017-2019)
- Blattodea (2020, ongoing)
- Konchuki (2020-2022)
- Hoshi Gari Sugidesho!? Inaba-san (2020-2022, Killing Bites spinoff)
- Shinigami Musume ha Peropero Shitai (2020-2022, written by Akashiro Aoi and storyboarded by Murata)
- Kaminaki Sekai no Onee-chan Katsudou (2022, written by Akashiro Aoi and storyboarded by Murata)
- Saikyō Skill "Inochigoi" de Kuyashii kedo Musō Shichau Moto Ōsama no Sekai Seifuku Katsudō (2023, ongoing)
Tropes common to his works:
- Animal Motifs: This started out tame in Jackals, but from Arachnid on most of his stories' casts are animal-themed superbeings and the plot will often pause to offer wild life trivia about their motifs — no matter if they're fighting or just doing mundane stuff.
- Art-Style Dissonance: His usual art style is pretty cutesy and is at odds with the stories he writes. All of his published works so far have been illustrated by other people.
- Attempted Rape: Seems like he can't not start a story with one of these and then have more at least once per arc or volume. All Abusers Are Male is by consequence a constant in his works, but some female characters also join in the "fun". And then there's how the Arachnid series manages to make a "rape zombie apocalypse" seem redundant...
- Author Appeal:
- Most of his stories are Fighting Series with narration that draws analogues between the characters and animals. Majo ni Ataeru Tettsui used the same format to talk about torture devices instead.
- He frequently uses a page layout consisting of a wide shot on a half-page panel, a Reaction Shot on the bottom right half and one or two small panels hooking into the next page.
- Has acknowledged that
he starts nearly every manga with ryona, introducing the female protagonists with threats of either rape or sexualized torture of some sort. On the other hand, the femdom fetish is also very prevalent is most of his works, along with master-servant relationships — with fits right into the bug motifs as many of them have dominant females. It's what Himenospia is all about. Also, another noticeable thing is that in Arachnid, Caterpillar and Himenospia, when a female antagonist appears wearing a dominatrix costume it is always specifically out of nowhere and in absurd circunstances. - Back-to-back plot twists bizarre enough to leave the protagonist just making flabbergasted reaction shots for an entire chapter.
- Sailor Moon, of which he made a fan comic titled "Sailor Moon: The War" that is available on his Pixiv page. Note how Dinoponera in Arachnid loves the in-universe Sailor-Force anime to the point she's actually named Setsuna or how one major character in Majo ni Ataeru Tettsui, Serena, was designed after Queen Serenity.
- Arachnid had a sexualized evil expy of Tomoko Kuroki named Geji introduced the year he married Sato. She drew an extra chapter about Geji and the character's birthday is the same as hers. Furthermore, when the Watamote anime was being promoted by the Gangan magazine, Shinya's illustration for the occasion was of his avatar clutching a body pillow of Tomoko. Make of that what you will.
- Author Avatar: The nondescript chibi figure in the above picture.
- Bondage Is Bad: Abusive master-servant relationships are a subject in nearly all of his works, and is the entire premise of Himenospia.
- Flash Step: One antagonist in Jackals had this "Brand Nero" Shadow Walker skill for getting in people's blind spots that is countered by an Offhand Backhand called "Killing Bite". This is alluded to in both Arachnid and Caterpillar, where everyone keeps teleporting behind each other and Kabutomushi, who fights a Brand Nero user, can perform the Killing Bite as a direct Continuity Nod. Killing Bites appears named after that scene, but uses bait-and-switches on call backs to it — the anti-heroine who keeps prattling about "what Killing Bites is" is prevented from countering a flash step from Taiga by another opponent; and later when Taiga does get countered and soundly defeated, it is by a mysterious antagonist offscreen.
- He Also Did: Runs the "Japan Onany Network" H-doujin circle with Sato. Matters related to that are kept separate from their professionally published work, but Murata goes by the "JON" username everywhere and the circle's website makes no secret that it's their work.
- Recycled In Space: He's really fond of that one "protagonist caught in the middle of a war between assassin organizations" premise. Combined with the trope below and how he writes and draws the storyboards for multiple manga at the same time, the recurring themes become very noticeable. At times he'll reuse plot points panel-by-panel or a character might start acting awfully similar to another one from a previous story."To think that i can write three manga about bugs battling (Arachnid, Caterpillar and Vaian Maiden) at the same time... I'm truly blessed!"—Afterword on Arachnid volume 7
- Reused Character Design: He'll either reuse some characters or make expies of them from work to work.
- In particular, he draws most of his heroines with plain-looking short hair. Turis from Jackals was the original one who was reimagined as Alice in Arachnid. Pure from Killing Bites and Himeno from Himenospia take after Alice in turn — especially the latter who borrows many of her personality and story points as well. Even Chiyuri in Blattodea looks like a black-haired Alice in sketches, but is distinguished a little by illustrator Hayami Tokisada.
- Eruza the cheetah-girl in Killing Bites is suspiciously similar to Megumi the roach-girl from Arachnid in both looks and personality at first (she's even introduced with the same uniform Megumi wore in the latter half of Arachnid), but is characterized differently later on. Megumi was then reused with blue hair in the Sengoku era story Choubu no Shinobi.
- A villain from Jackals, Domino, is reused as the protagonist of Majo ni Ataeru Tettsui. That story's Serena Cervantes is then reused in Himenospia as one of the antagonists and then that incarnation is reused into Blattodea as its new main villain.
- Shown Their Work: One can tell he enjoys doing research for the narration funfacts about animals in each story, since there's plenty of interesting obscure trivia in those scenes and illustrations from research papers are sometimes used in his works. There's also several inaccurate or exaggerated details on them, though.
- The 'Verse: Choubu no Shinobi, Jackals, Caterpillar, Arachnid and Blattodea take place in the same setting, in that order. The city of Cicero from Jackals is implied to exist in the Himenospia setting and is directly mentioned in Killing Bites.
