A History of Manga, Part 3: Manga Goes Global, Then Digital

Part 2 left the Japanese industry at its 1995 peak. Part 3 follows manga out of Japan: the activists and small presses who first translated it, the television wave that built an American audience, the 2000s bookstore boom and the 2011 bust, and the digital decade in which simultaneous publication, webtoons, and a pandemic turned manga into the largest category of comics sold in the United States.

Manga goes global (1978–2011)

English-language manga began as an act of activism. Keiji Nakazawa's Barefoot Gen, an autobiographical account of the Hiroshima bombing, was serialized in Weekly Shōnen Jump from 1973. A volunteer group called Project Gen, founded in Tokyo in 1976, produced English translations from 1978 and distributed them through the War Resisters League in New York. A 1980 edition from Leonard Rifas's EduComics is generally described as the first full-length manga published in the West.

The commercial history starts a few years later. Frederik Schodt's Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics (1983) was the first serious English-language book on the subject. In 1986 Shogakukan backed Seiji Horibuchi's founding of VIZ in San Francisco, the first company dedicated to bringing manga to American readers; its first titles hit comic shops in 1987. That same year First Comics began publishing Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima's samurai epic Lone Wolf and Cub with covers by Frank Miller and others, and in 1988 Marvel's Epic imprint launched Akira in a colorized edition — Steve Oliff's digital coloring was itself a landmark — that ran 38 issues and sold about five million copies internationally.

Through the 1990s manga in America stayed a niche within the comic-shop world, sold as flipped, left-to-right monthly issues at American prices. Television changed the audience. Cartoon Network's Toonami block launched in March 1997 and soon added Dragon Ball Z and Sailor Moon; the Pokémon anime reached US syndication in September 1998. A generation of children grew up on anime before they ever saw a manga page.

Two decisions in 2002 turned that audience into a market. Tokyopop, under Stu Levy, relaunched its line as "100% Authentic Manga": unflipped, read right-to-left as in Japan, in the compact tankōbon format, at $9.99 a volume. Levy later said he "bet the company on it." Bookstores, which had never known what to do with monthly comics, could shelve these like novels. And on November 26, 2002, VIZ launched an American edition of Shonen Jump with Dragon Ball Z, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Yu Yu Hakusho, and One Piece in the first issue; it went through three printings and sold more than 300,000 copies.

The boom that followed peaked in 2007 at about $210 million in North American sales, by the industry analyst ICv2's estimate. The bust was as sharp. The 2008 recession, unlicensed scanlations online, and the collapse of the Borders bookstore chain — which had once accounted for as much as 40 percent of US manga sales and filed for bankruptcy in February 2011 — cut the market roughly in half by 2012. Tokyopop shut down its North American publishing operation effective May 31, 2011, citing Borders directly. Seven publishers closed in all.

Digital, and the 2020s boom (2012–2026)

The industry that rebuilt itself after 2011 did so around the internet. The American Shonen Jump print magazine ended in March 2012 and was replaced by a digital weekly. In December 2018 VIZ went further: for $1.99 a month, readers could access more than 10,000 back chapters, and new chapters appeared free on the same day as Japan. Shueisha followed a month later with its own global app, Manga Plus, free and simultaneous in English. Kodansha's K Manga arrived in 2023. The gap between Japanese and English publication, which scanlation sites had existed to fill, closed to zero.

Something similar was happening in Japan. In 2024 the Japanese manga market hit a record ¥704.3 billion, its seventh straight year of growth, but the mix had inverted: electronic comics were ¥512.2 billion of that, while print tankōbon fell 8.6 percent and magazines nearly 10 percent. In 2025 the total slipped for the first time since 2017, to ¥692.5 billion, with digital now 76 percent of the market. In August 2026 Weekly Shōnen Jump's print circulation was reported below one million for the first time — 985,000 copies, against 6.53 million at its 1995 peak.

The form itself was changing too. Korean webtoons — full-color comics built to be scrolled vertically on a phone — moved from Naver and Kakao's platforms into global print. Chugong's Solo Leveling began as a web novel on KakaoPage in 2017, became a webcomic in 2018, accumulated more than 14 billion views, and got an anime adaptation in 2024. American retailers now shelve manga and manhwa together, and Circana's figures usually count them together.

Then came the pandemic. With bookstores closed and anime streaming on Netflix and Crunchyroll, North American manga sales, which had already reached a record of just under $250 million in 2020, more than doubled in 2021: 24.4 million print units, up 160 percent. Manga accounted for nearly 77 percent of all adult-fiction graphic novels sold in the US that year. The overall North American comics and graphic novel market hit $2.075 billion in 2021, up 62 percent in a single year. It cooled in 2023 and 2024 — manga dollars fell about 13 percent in 2024 — and then, according to ICv2's 2025 white paper, reached a new high of $2.2 billion, with manga sales through comic shops up 33 percent even as the distributor Diamond went through bankruptcy.

The numbers attached to individual series have become difficult to compare with anything else in publishing. Eiichiro Oda's One Piece, running in Jump since 1997, holds the Guinness record for most copies of a single comic series by one author; it was certified at 516.6 million in 2022 and announced 600 million worldwide in March 2026. Dragon Ball stands at roughly 260 million, Naruto at more than 250 million, Demon Slayer at 220 million as of July 2025, and Jujutsu Kaisen at 150 million. Koyoharu Gotouge, Demon Slayer's creator, was named to the TIME100 in 2021, the first manga artist to be. The 2025 film Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle earned about ¥34 billion in Japan and more than $100 million in North America, and depending on which tally is used, somewhere between $555 million and $666 million worldwide — the highest-grossing anime film and the highest-grossing Japanese film ever released.

The medium's next arguments are already under way. In 2024 a Tokyo startup, Orange Inc., raised about $19 million from investors including Shogakukan to translate manga with AI at a rate of up to 500 titles a month; professional translators objected, and the company later clarified that only a handful of its releases were machine-translated. Akira Toriyama died in March 2024. Netflix's live-action One Piece returned for a second season in March 2026 and was the platform's most-watched show worldwide the week it dropped. VIZ, founded in a San Francisco apartment 40 years ago, marked its anniversary this year as the publisher of 15 of the 20 best-selling manga volumes in America.

It has been 212 years since Hokusai's first sketchbook and 79 since New Treasure Island. The word has outlasted every argument about what it should mean.

Sources for Part 3