Gosho Aoyama made his debut in 1992 with Chotto Matte (Wait a Minute), which won Shogakukan's prestigious Shinjin Comic Taisho (Newcomer's Award for Comics) and launched his career as a critically acclaimed, top-selling manga artist. In addition to Detective Conan, which won the Shogakukan Manga Award in 2001, Aoyama created the popular manga Yaiba, which won the Shogakukan Manga Award in 1992. Aoyama's manga is greatly influenced by his boyhood love for mystery, adventure and baseball, and he has cited the tales of Arsene Lupin and Sherlock Holmes and the samurai films of Akira Kurosawa as some of his childhood favorites.