Chica Umino is a Japanese manga artist and illustrator who works under a pen name. She's best known for Honey and Clover, the series that made her career—it won the Kodansha Manga Award in 2003 and later got adapted into an anime by J.C.Staff.
Her pen name actually comes from a place she loves: an amusement park by the sea (Umi no Chikaku no Youenchi). Before breaking into professional manga, she created doujinshi works with that same title. She's openly an otaku who loves Harry Potter and Hayao Miyazaki films, and she's cited Western children's literature like Anne of Green Gables as a major influence on her storytelling—especially how she writes unconventional family dynamics.
Honey and Clover started serializing in 2000 through Shueisha's CUTiEcomic magazine, but the series bounced around: the first fourteen chapters ran there, then it moved to Young YOU, and when that magazine folded in 2005, it shifted to Chorus. The manga wrapped up in July 2006 after 64 chapters total. The anime adaptation helped solidify its legacy.
Since then, she's moved on to March Comes in Like a Lion (Sangatsu no Raion), which serializes in Hakusensha's Young Animal. She's also done character design work—most notably for the anime Eden of the East (2009), directed by Kenji Kamiyama—and illustrated various other projects like "Tobira wo Akete" and the Glass Heart series.
Content compiled by AnimeList.moe from publicly available sources.
