Mikio Ikemoto is a Japanese manga artist born on January 13, 1977, in Kyoto Prefecture. He began his professional career in March 1997 when he submitted the one-shot manga Cosmos to Weekly Shōnen Jump, earning a Tenkaichi Manga Award. The one-shot was published in the July 7 issue of the magazine and was later serialized in the independent magazine Monthly Plasma from June 1997 to September 1999. A sequel one-shot was published in the April 26, 1999 issue of Weekly Shōnen Jump.

Ikemoto’s career became deeply connected with the Naruto franchise when he was recruited as an assistant to series creator Masashi Kishimoto. Kishimoto, who had become aware of Ikemoto’s work on Cosmos, asked his editor to scout him after learning that Shueisha had offered Ikemoto an assistant position on a comedy series. Kishimoto believed Ikemoto’s artistic talent would be wasted on a comedy and successfully brought him onto the Naruto team starting with the seventh chapter. Ikemoto worked as Kishimoto’s chief assistant on Naruto from 1999 to 2014, with responsibilities that included drawing crowds and background figures, adding highlights and tones, and occasionally designing new characters.

After the conclusion of Naruto in 2014, Shueisha asked Kishimoto to begin a sequel series. Kishimoto declined the offer and instead proposed that Ikemoto illustrate the new series, citing his extensive experience. In 2016, Ikemoto began illustrating Boruto: Naruto Next Generations, initially working with writer Ukyō Kodachi. The series began serialization in Weekly Shōnen Jump on May 9, 2016. Masashi Kishimoto has supervised the project and, starting with volume 14, took over as writer while Ikemoto continued as illustrator. The manga had one million copies in print as of January 2017 and has been collected into multiple tankōbon volumes. The series also inspired an anime adaptation produced by Studio Pierrot that aired from 2017 to 2023, and Ikemoto has provided illustrations for the Boruto light novels. The story continues in the ongoing sequel Boruto: Two Blue Vortex, with Ikemoto remaining as artist.

Ikemoto’s artistic identity has been shaped by several key influences. He has cited Kinnikuman and particularly Akira Toriyama’s Dragon Ball as major inspirations, noting that Toriyama’s minimal use of tones makes drawing easier and that he still uses Dragon Ball as a reference for his own action scenes. In a 2024 interview, he stated that he learned almost everything about how to draw from Dragon Ball. He has also cited The Matrix film trilogy as an influence on Boruto. His drawing methods involve using a Criterium mechanical pencil on IC paper for sketches and ink for finished drawings. For colored pages, he uses Copic markers, similar to Kishimoto’s approach on Naruto.

Ikemoto has acknowledged that his art style differs from Kishimoto’s, and Kishimoto specifically advised him not to imitate the Naruto style but to develop his own. While noting that some long-time fans might be disappointed that Kishimoto does not draw Boruto, Ikemoto has expressed optimism about his approach. He has admitted that he finds comedy difficult to draw and feels the story of Boruto does not lend itself well to comedic elements. Regular chapters of Boruto tend to exceed 40 pages, and Ikemoto has stated that while he feels honored to create the art for the series, he is grateful it is released monthly rather than weekly due to the stress of weekly serialization.

Boruto anime director Hiroyuki Yamashita has praised Ikemoto’s style, describing it as more realistic than Kishimoto’s due to the attention to detail in character designs and commending his oblong landscape layout for frames. Manga author Yoshihiro Togashi has also expressed enjoyment of Ikemoto’s artwork. Masashi Kishimoto has stated that Boruto is completely Ikemoto’s manga, clarifying that for the sequel series, Ikemoto is in charge of both the story and the main illustrations, a different workflow from Naruto where Kishimoto handled both while Ikemoto assisted with backgrounds and other elements.