Toshio Maeda

is an erotic manga artist who was prolific in the 1980s and '90s. Several of Maeda's works have been used as a basis for original video animations (OVA) including La Blue Girl, Adventure Kid, Demon Beast Invasion, Demon Warrior Koji and his most notorious work, Urotsukidōji (Legend of the Overfiend). An interviewer commented that Urotsukidōji "firmly placed him in the history books—in Japan and abroad—as the pioneer of the genre known as hentai, or "perverted".

Early career Toshio Maeda began reading manga when he was 5 or 6 years old, as well as American comics such as Mighty Mouse, Spider-Man and Batman. He was also a reader of all genres of literature and has said that he read more than 10,000 books before he was 20 years old.

Maeda's best known series, Urotsukidōji, came out in 1986 and gained popularity abroad. The Erotic Anime Movie Guide (1998) claimed that "No other title apart from Akira has been so influential in the English-language market". Maeda was working for an adult magazine at the time and wanted to create something different in terms of erotica.

In 1999, Maeda collaborated with Phoenix Entertainment (who previously adapted one of Maeda's works, Gedou Gakuen (or Nightmare Campus, as it is called overseas)) as an executive producer to work on a three episode OVA series, known as Kairaku Satsujin Chōsakan Koji (Sex Murder investigator Koji), also known in the west as Demon Warrior Koji.

Maeda was a Guest of Honor at the Big Apple Anime Fest (BAAF) held in New York City in October 2001. An ANN writer covering the story praised him as "the most influential erotic manga artist in Japan" and called Urotsukidoji "the foundation for the entire 'erotic-grotesque' genre of Japanese anime". Maeda was the Keynote Speaker at the BAAF Symposium and introduced a retrospective of his work.

A motorbike accident in 2001 left Maeda with limited ability in his drawing hand but he continued to use his computer to create characters and write scripts.

In 2016 Toshio Maeda appeared in the British horror film Spidarlings directed by Selene Kapsaski. Coinciding with Fakku's English release of the Urotsukidoji manga, Maeda appeared at a release party and exhibit at Floating World Comics in Portland, Oregon in December of 2016.