The third volume of the Hetalia Axis Powers manga collects the following comics, plus many more! - United States of Hetalia - Salted Salmon, Germany, and I - Can't Escape From Italy - To Create Better Products in Northern Europe - Boss Spain and Chibiromano - China's Age of Exploration - The Ruler of Scandinavia and the King of Eastern Europe - March Revolution Executive - Nekotalia: If the World was All About Cats - Kick-off of the Battlefield!
Hidekaz Himaruya (日丸屋 秀和 Himaruya Hidekaz, born May 8th, 1985, in Koriyama, Fukushima) is the creator of the series Hetalia: Axis Powers (originally titled Axis Powers Hetalia in the webcomic run). He is sometimes affectionately called Papa Hima, by Hetalia fans. Himaruya started the original Hetalia webcomic while he was attending Parsons School Of Design in New York City and continues the series in the present. He is currently an art design major and makes posts about his day-to-day life on his blog the Bamboo Thicket, along with the latest character designs and sketches.
Besides Hetalia, his website Kitayume (which started on June 19th, 2003) showcases his other manga projects and artwork. His latest series, Chibi-san Date, currently runs in the magazine Comic Birz by Gentosha Comics (which also published the printed versions of the Hetalia manga).
Himaruya lived in New York from late 2006 until some point in early 2009, when he moved back to Japan following the release of the Hetalia anime and his contract with Comic Birz.
In the earlier days of the Kitayume site (2003-2007), he used the name Kazuyoshi Himaruya (日丸屋 和良 Himaruya Kazuyoshi), which most notably appears in the credits of the Gakuen Hetalia demo. Estonia's character design is based on his appearance, although his hair and eye color is different. On his blog and update logs from the archived versions of Kitayume, Himaruya mentions that he is a fan of South Park and Happy Tree Friends. In some instances, he has referenced the song Let's Fighting Love (from the South Park episode Good Times With Weapons) by using the phrase and replacing "Fighting" with another word of his choice, such as: "Let's Flying Pan-ing Love" and "Let's Englanding Love". He is also a fan of the horror visual novels Higurashi When They Cry and Umineko no Naku Koro ni by Ryukishi07, which coincidentally, both received animated adaptations by Studio DEEN. Himaruya's hobbies (mentioned on the bio page at Kitayume) include photography, architecture, and collecting postcards. The programs he uses to color and ink his artwork are: SAI Painter and Adobe Photoshop Elements 6. He allows the usage of images from his site, show, and blog as long as no profit is involved, and encourages fans to create their own original characters, fan videos (MADs), or cosplay inspired by his works, though he actively discourages fans from copying CDs. Selling any of the downloadable site games for profit is also prohibited. He's admitted to having a rather questionable naming sense, and encouraged the fans to call the gender flipped nations by whichever names they chose to.
(head to desk) I have finished. I went to a Japanese market and bought the Japanese version (with full color!), but one minor error was that I can't read Japanese. Good think for online, English-translated webcomics though :D I'm a major otaku, as well as a bit of a fangirl (keywords, a bit), and this was a great volume to read. This volume corresponds to seasons 3 and 4, the last seasons of Hetalia (or so they thought...). To any Hetalia fangirl, get this. It costed me 1000 yen, but it was a good buy. Half of the joy coming from this manga is just owning it. The other half would be to directly read it, but I was stuck finding a translation... The first five or ten pages were in color, and then there were character profiles, a map of the world indicating which country a character was from, and there are little side doodles and notes (again, all in Japanese). The illustrations were awesome, and as an artist, they were great to refer back to when drawing pictures of the countries from Hetalia. There were pages splayed throughout the manga where there would be a picture of a country and how they would write the names of the Axis and Allies in their native language. Overall, I LOVED IT! (sorry for the bad review. Kind of fangirling out and not concentrating well...)
YAY. :D I am so happy I read it. It was amazing!!!! I spent all morning reading this book. I started reading just when mailwoman brought me my mail and I unpacked this book, I started to read it like a mad and I couldn't even go to eat, because it was so interesting. I just loved in this volume was so much told about Middle Ages and Lithuania finally showed as brave warrior. That's the spirit of us Lithuanians! We are brave and fearless, we fight and fight to be free and strong. And it was so much about France and Prussia an many other countries. I just missed much more about England, Russia and America... And it was interesting to read about Nordic Brothers. :) And I just loved pages where it was written how other countries say names of their neighbours in their language. I just noticed that where was Lithuania's page, it might be the author or printing made mistake. :( France is PRANCŪZIJA in Lithuanian, and they wrote PRANCUZIJA. Oh well... It was just one letter wrong.
But in all case I LOVED ALL BOOK. :) So interesting and funny. I had great morning reading it.
Hey can I prove that I read this by saying "WHERE IS HIMAPAPA?!" "well... I guess. Merry Christmas ;_;" "APRIL FOOOOOOOOLS WHY NO WHERE ARE YOUUUUU" "did he dieeee" "IT'S TOMORROOOOOW" "wow...that must be...hard" (in response to homestucks) yeah saying any of those prove that i am obsessed. and that I miss Himaruya.