Hideko Mizuno (水野英子, Mizuno Hideko, born 29 October 1939 in Shimonoseki, Yamaguchi, Japan) is one of the first successful female Japanese shōjo manga artists. She was an assistant of Osamu Tezuka staying in Tokiwa-sō. She made her professional debut in 1955 with Akakke Kōma Pony, a Western story with a tomboy heroine. She became a prominent shōjo artist in the 1960s and 1970s, starting with White Troika, which serialized in Margaret in 1963.
Mizuno is best known for Fire! (1969–1971), one of the first shōjo manga with a boy protagonist, for which she won the 1970 Shogakukan Manga Award. Her Honey Honey no Suteki na Bouken (1966) was adapted as an anime television series, licensed in English as Honey Honey on CBN Cable Network.
Hideko Mizuno discovered manga very early: at the age of 8 she read the manga Shin Takarajima by Osamu Tezuka as well as his book Manga Daigaku which teaches the basics of manga creation, thanks to these two books, she took Tezuka as a model and decided to become a mangaka. In 1952 at the age of 12, she regularly contributed to competitions organized by the monthly magazine Manga Shōnen chaired by Tezuka. Although her manga was never accepted, her efforts did not go unnoticed: she received an honorable mention and publisher Akira Maruyama from Kōdansha took notice. In March 1955 when she was about to leave junior high for work, not wishing to go to high school, she received a letter from Maruyama, an order for a board and two illustrations for the magazine Shōjo Club, Hideko Mizuno was then 15 years old.

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