Hiromu Arakawa (荒川弘) is the creator of the Fullmetal Alchemist series in Japan. She's a private woman who prefers to illustrate herself as a cow wearing glasses in her manga series. This is partly becasue she is from a farming area of Japan that specialized in dairy.

One of Hiromu Arakawa's most defining characteristics is her habit of going to book stores and purchasing a variety of random books from used book stores. In the omake pages of Fullmetal Alchemist Vol. 21, Arakawa illustrated a short comic telling the story of how a book store cashier figured out her identity by just her last name and the assortment of books she had bought.