The *Real* Origins of Manga

I spent several years in Japan researching the history and origins of manga and found out that the dominant narrative is mostly nonsense. So I made a YouTube video in order to get the word out (well, that and promote my book). My apologies for the lighting being all over the place; I had to figure a lot of this out as I was filming the video. Hopefully you'll nonetheless find the video interesting and useful.

Should you find it interesting enough to check out the (now Eisner Award-winning, what!) book the video is based on, you can find it here (and anywhere else books are sold):
Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/a/80132/97819788...
Amazon.com: https://www.amazon.com/Comics-Origins...

Quick correction: Kitazawa succeeded Imaizumi in 1899 (not 1902). 1902 is when the Jiji Manga page started, but Kitazawa had started drawing individual cartoons for the Jiji Shinpo three years prior to that. I've published some additional research on Imaizumi since, which you can find here, along with many images of early pantomime cartoons in Japan:
https://www.tcj.com/laying-the-ground...

Another minor correction: it's not actually clear whether the popularity of the term "ponchi" was due to the Japan Punch or the original British Punch.

You can view the full Hokusai Manga here (the site's in Japanese, but it's easy to navigate even if you don't read Japanese): https://www.benricho.org/Unchiku/Ukiy...

Here's the original Busch story about the ducks and the frog (near the bottom): https://www.kurbeltheater.de/stuecke-...

Here's the Japanese adaptation of it (frames 19 and 20 out of 25): https://dl.ndl.go.jp/info:ndljp/pid/8...

Anyone curious about the origins of speech balloons and such can find my article on that here (Comics and the Origins of Manga features an updated and expanded version of this): https://imagetextjournal.com/the-crea...

I've also written a short listicle on common myths about manga history here:   / ten-myths-about-manga-history