Karino Takatsu is a Japanese manga artist best known as the original creator of the Working!! series, which was adapted into the anime Wagnaria!!2, Wagnaria!!3, and WWW.WAGNARIA!!. Born on July 20, 1982, in Hokkaido, Japan, Takatsu began her career by publishing web comics on her personal website in 2002 under the nickname Gahako. One of these early web comics, titled Working!!, was inspired by her part-time job experiences at a family restaurant in her hometown. The online comic gained popularity and led to an offer from the publisher Square Enix to serialize a commercial version in its magazine Young Gangan starting in December 2004. To distinguish between the two, Takatsu refers to the original web comic as the cat group and the commercially serialized version as the dog group.

The commercial success of Working!! led to multiple anime adaptations. The first season, known in English as Wagnaria!!, aired in April 2010 and was produced by studio A-1 Pictures. This was followed by Working!! 2 in October 2011 and a third season that concluded the main story. In 2016, a separate anime titled WWW.Wagnaria!! was produced, based on the original web comic version of Working!!. Takatsu's other notable works have also received anime adaptations. Servant x Service, a comedy series about government office workers that was inspired by her own time as a civil servant, was adapted into a television anime by A-1 Pictures in July 2013.

The majority of Takatsu's published works are four-panel comic strips, a format that suits her brand of workplace comedy and character-driven humor. Her artistic style is often noted for its simple and consistent character designs, with the narrative and dialogue carrying the comedic weight of her stories. Her professional manga bibliography includes Working!! which ran from 2004 to 2014 and is collected in 13 volumes, followed by an epilogue titled Working!! RE:Order in 2015. She wrote Servant x Service from 2007 to 2014, compiled into 4 volumes. Other works include the one-shots Natsume Net! and Hokago Maze, the supernatural comedy Ore no kanojo ni nanika yōkai which was serialized from 2011 to 2020 and spans 7 volumes, and Dustbox 2.5 which was published from 2015 to 2021 in 8 volumes. Her most recent series, Owl Night, began publication in Monthly Shōnen Gangan in June 2021.