54-year-old artist also worked in Tokyo Kogakuin College of Technology's manga department

The wife of Ganbare Goemon manga artist Hiroshi Obi posted on his Twitter account on Sunday that he passed away on Sunday at 7:40 a.m. after being taken to the hospital on Saturday evening with a brain stem hemorrhage. He was 54.

Obi, who is from Hokkaido, debuted as a manga creator in 1982 in a special edition of Monthly Shonen Jump with the Hoshi no Ōji-sama manga. He began serializing the manga version of Konami's Ganbare Goemon video game franchise (known as Goemon or Mystical Ninja in English) in Kodansha's Comic Ponpon magazine in 1991, and continued to publish various Ganbare Goemon manga adaptations throughout the 1990s.

Obi had recently been working on a Yatterman remake manga titled Yatterman Dengeki Daisakusen! . He also recently worked on a refurbished edition of his Ganbare Goemon Yuki-hime Kyūshutsu Emaki manga, which Kodansha released last November.

Obi had also been working as a lecturer in the manga department of Tokyo Kogakuin College of Technology since 2007.

Sources: Tokyo Sports, J-Cast News, Asahi Shimbun via Yaraon!