2026 Eisner Award Award Winner—Best Academic/Scholarly Work
A comprehensive English-language history of a beloved medium, Manga’s First Century tells the story of the artists and fans who built a cultural juggernaut.
Manga is the world’s most popular style of comics. How did manga and anime—“moving manga”—become ubiquitous? Manga’s First Century delves into the history and finds surprising answers.
In fact, manga has always been a global phenomenon. Countering essentialist myths of manga’s emergence from the deepest wells of Japanese art, author Andrea Horbinski shows it was born in the early 1900s, a hybrid form that crossed single-panel satirical cartoons popular in Europe and America with the Edo period’s artistic legacy. As a medium, manga initially focused on political commentary, expanding to include social satire, children’s comics, and proletarian art in the 1920s and 1930s. Manga’s evolution into a medium embracing complex, long-form storytelling was likewise driven by creators and fans pushing publishers to accept new, radical expansions in manga’s artistic and narrative practices. In the 1970s, innovative creators and fans empowered a new breed of fan-generated comics (dōjinshi) and established robust audiences of adult, female, and queer manga readers, while nurturing generations of amateur and professional creators who continue to enrich and renew manga today.
Andrea Horbinski earned her PhD in modern Japanese history and new media from the University of California, Berkeley. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Anime and Manga Studies and as the submissions editor for Mechademia: Second Arc.
"Manga are big. And in the growing field of manga studies, Andrea Horbinski’s work is a standout. With years of deep research, rich new insights, and sparkling prose, Manga's First Century will delight academics and serious fans alike."—Frederik L. Schodt, author of the 1983 Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics
"Manga’s First Century is a landmark in Japanese popular culture studies, a comprehensive history that covers everything from prewar manga to boys' love to the rise and importance of fan culture. Above all, it illuminates the extraordinarily rich culture that is manga, making us remember why it has continued to fascinate readers for more than a hundred years."—Susan Napier, author of Miyazakiworld: A Life in Art
"Andrea Horbinski offers a meticulously researched history of Japanese manga, with an eye to the associated practices of anime and gaming and their massive fandoms. Indeed, it is impossible to isolate the histories and cultures of any of these art forms. But Horbinski offers a very concise narrative as she weaves her way through these complex sets of historical and cultural objects and subjects. Her original view comes from her discerning and critical eye for the evidence she has mined over many years of research, as she follows the threads of the history of manga within the intensely complex and tightly woven fabric of Japanese histories and cultures."—Frenchy Lunning, author of Cosplay: The Fictional Mode of Existence
"Horbinski provides a unique history of manga by cleverly weaving together the roles played by artists, publishers, and fans in the development of the medium, usefully contextualized in the ever-changing and globally engaged culture of Japan."—James Welker, author of Transfiguring Women in Late Twentieth-Century Japan: Feminists, Lesbians, and Girls' Comics Artists and Fans
448 pp.6 x 9Illus: 20 b/w illustrations, 11 color illustrations
9780520403994$29.95|£25.00Paper
Oct 2025