The Best Manga in America

Manga in the U.S. still gets flattened into stereotypes — people imagine big-eyed heroes in fight scenes or teen romances with pastel covers. But the field is far bigger, stranger, and more varied than that. Even the sliver translated into English shows a scope and ambition far beyond the superhero monotony that dominates much of American comics.

Now in its second year, the American Manga Awards (ceremony and decisions on August 21!) highlight that variety. Nominations this year again recognize works that don’t fit easily into the well-worn boxes of shonen (for boys) or shojo (for girls). To explain how, let’s go category by category, with my picks for the standouts of the past year.

Best New Manga

• Dragon and Chameleon vol. 1 (Ryo Ishiyama, Square Enix Manga)

• The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn’t a Guy at All vol. 1 (Sumiko Arai, Yen Press)

• Hikaru in the Light! Vol. 1 (Mai Matsuda, Scholastic Graphix)

• Spacewalking With You vol. 1 (Inuhiko Doronoda, Kodansha Comics)

• A Witch’s Life in Mongol vol. 1 (Tomato Tomato Soup, Yen Press)

This slate alone shows how new manga ranges from lesbian rocker romances to 13th-century Mongol revenge epics. Two titles (Guy and Witch) are already confirmed for anime adaptations next year. But my vote in this section goes to Dragon and Chameleon for taking the tired body-swap trope and turning it into a sharp meditation on how manga actually gets made, from superstar writer to overworked assistant.

Best Continuing Series

• The Apothecary Diaries (Manga), vol. 12 – 13 (Natsu Hyuuga, Square Enix Manga)

• Hirayasumi, vol. 3 – 5 (Keigo Shinzo, VIZ Media)

• Innocent, Omnibus Edition, vol. 3 (Shin’ichi Sakamoto, Dark Horse Manga)

• Search and Destroy, vol. 2 (Atsushi Kaneko, Fantagraphics)

• The Summer Hikaru Died, vol. 5 (Mokumokuren, Yen Press)

Longevity favors The Apothecary Diaries, with its delicate palace-intrigue puzzles. But Hirayasumi deserves the crown. Its portrait of a drifting 29-year-old slacker and his equally unmoored teenage cousin captures true ennui, not cheap self-pity. Meanwhile Search and Destroy earns an honorable nod for sheer dystopian bite. It’s a disturbingly prescient reinterpretation of a manga from pioneering writer Osamu Tezuka about humans harvesting robot parts.

Best One-Shot

• Brain Damage (Kago, Fantagraphics)

• H.P. Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space (Gou Tanabe, Dark Horse Manga)

• A Smart and Courageous Child (Miki Yamamoto, TOKYOPOP)

• Stardust Family (Aki Poroyama, Yen Press)

• Tamaki & Amane (Fumi Yoshinaga, Yen Press)

One-shots often tackle politics and social anxieties whether something from the gamut parenting fears or LGBTQ issues. Personally, I was drawn more to the deliberately horrific nominees this year, and the omnibus structure of Brain Damage with its bizarre punchline twist endings continues to resonate despite the fact that author Shintaro Kago explicitly states in the notes that he was mainly coming up with bizarre scenarios to leads to those punchlines than writing linear stories. Somehow, that just works to make them seem that much scarier.

Best New Edition of a Classic

• Ashita no Joe: Fighting for Tomorrow, vol. 1 – 2 (Asao Takamori, Vertical Comics)

• The Legend of Kamui, vol. 1 (Shirato Sanpei, Drawn and Quarterly)

• Mansect (Shinichi Koga, Living the Line)

• Short Game (Mitsuru Adachi, DENPA BOOKS)

• They Were 11! (Moto Hagia, DENPA BOOKS)

The trouble with classic manga is that they’re classic for a reason. I could spend an entire article just discussing the cultural importance of Ashita no Joe but I’d have to give you a lot of context about sports manga in Japan first! By comparison, The Legend of Kamui is quite easy to explain. Think about everything you know about samurai-era Japan, the idealized honor and stuff like that. Now imagine an epic story discussing how that’s all a load of hooey, and supposedly ethnicized ideas like the burakunin were designed by the ruling class as a means to keep the working class divided.

The Marxism of The Legend of Kamui may be sixty years old but it’s more relevant now than ever before, if only because this story actually explains how and why feudalist Japanese society enabled such toxic social structures instead of just expecting the reader to take for granted that landlords are the bad guys, encouraging the reader to make their own connections to their own culture instead of assuming the Japanese were backwards savages. The book itself looks and feels really good too, as it deserves, this being the first English translation despite the importance of the series in Japanese manga history.

Best Translation

• Ryan Holmberg – Face Meat (Tara Bonten, Living the Line)

• minami – The Otaku Love Connection, vol. 1 (Chu Amairo, Square Enix Manga)

• Ben Applegate – Search and Destroy, vol. 2 (Atsushi Kaneko, Fantagraphics)

• Andreas Kronberg Danielsen – The Tale of Jiraiya the Gallant, vol. 1 (Egao Mizugaki, Blue Feathered Quill)

• Ajani Oloye – Ultra Heaven, vol. 1 (Keiichi Koike, Last Gasp)

What’s the difference between a well-translated manga, and one that’s just plain good? What makes a translation “good”? Not just accuracy, but voice. Sure, the English script of Search and Destroy is quite good at maintaining that series’ cyberpunk vibe and influence. But there’s just no real comparison when it comes to exceptional use of the craft of translation. The Otaku Love Connection nails the queasy, awkward cadences of geeky teens who “ship” classmates. The result is cringey, creepy, and absolutely right—proof that translation itself can be a creative act.

Best Lettering

• Evan Hayden – Ashita no Joe: Fighting for Tomorrow, vol. 1 – 2 (Asao Takamori, Vertical Comics)

• Rebecca Sze – Cat Man (PARARI, Seven Seas)

• Robert Harkins – Love Laid Bare (Ouchi Kaeru, FAKKU)

• Joven Voon – My Tiny Senpai, vol. 1 (Saisou, J-Novel Club)

• Phil Christie – Search and Destroy, vol. 1 (Atsushi Kaneko, Fantagraphics)

Lettering rarely gets the spotlight, but good design can make or break a page. My pick: Search and Destroy again, for its sharp, immersive flow.

Best Publication Design

• Adam Grano – JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Steel Ball Run – Part 7: Steel Ball Run, vol. 1 (Hirohiko Araki, VIZ Media)

• Lucia Gargiulo & Tom Devlin – The Legend of Kamui, vol. 1(Shirato Sanpei, Drawn and Quarterly)

• Riley VanDyke & Carl Gustav Horn – Planetes Deluxe Edition, Book 1(Makoto Yukimura, Dark Horse Manga)

• emuh ruh – Seaside Beta(ohuton, Glacier Bay Books)

• Kohei Nawata Design Office – Veil, vol. 1 – Temperature of Orange(Kotteri, Udon Entertainment)

JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure is the only manga series on the American Manga Awards slate I feel comfortable describing as reasonably mainstream. As the “Part 7” implies, this is a long-running series, although this particular story is only really thematically related to the others. It depicts a nineteenth century Wild West cross-country horseback race with characters who certainly bear strong similarities to characters from previous parts, complete with ridiculous muscles and bizarre invisible ghost powers they can plausibly hide from other characters. But you don’t really need to know anything about JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure to appreciate the intensity of this sort-of-technically-but-not-really a prequel, and the publication design certainly emphasizes that. Sorry Legend of Kamui. Your design is good, but however important you may be historically, there’s no competing with JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure on matters of sheer style.

Manga may still be treated as some niche “weird Japanese thing,” but the American Manga Awards make it plain: the medium is as wide, unruly, and inventive as any in the world. If one of these titles makes you rethink what comics can do, the awards have done their job.