J.M. Ken Niimura is a Spanish-Japanese cartoonist and illustrator. He has produced work within the Spanish, North American and Japanese comic book markets. Niimura was born and grew up in Madrid, Spain. He graduated in Fine Arts at the Complutense University of Madrid. Niimura started his career in the early 2000's within the Spanish self-publishing comic scene. His major professional debut however happened in the US in 2009, when he illustrated the series I Kill Giants (Image comics), written by Joe Kelly and adapted into a live-action movie in 2018. The success of I Kill Giants led Niimura to collaborate with various magazines around the world, such as 'Black' (Italy), 'Mandala' (Japan), 'Popgun' (USA), 'C'est Bon Anthology' (Sweden), 'Spera' (USA) and 'Fluide Glamour' (France). The resulting short stories were collected in the anthology Traveling (2014). In 2013 Niimura moved to Japan, to work in the manga industry. He serialised the semi-autobiographical diary manga Henshin (2013) in the magazine 'Monthly Ikki' from publisher Shogakukan. His next major project was the webcomic Umami (2019), about two cooks in a fantastic world. The work won the 2019 Eisner Award for Best Digital Comic.