Brooklyn Museum opens Art of Manga with 600 drawings
More than 600 hand-drawn pages from Japanese comics have gone on display at the Brooklyn Museum in New York.
Art of Manga opened on 3 October and runs to 31 January 2027, according to The Art Newspaper. Manga means Japanese comics and graphic novels. The museum bills the show as the first major exhibition in the Americas to treat them as an art form, according to the Brooklyn Museum.
The show follows an initial run at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Both versions were curated by Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere, deputy director general of the MOA Museum of Art in Atami, Japan. The New York iteration was co-organised by Joan Cummins, the Brooklyn Museum's curatorial chair and senior curator of Asian art, and Pauline Vermare, its curator of photography.
The hang spans multiple generations of makers. It includes There is Always a Traitor (2018), a life-sized 12-panel painting by Hirohiko Araki, the artist behind the long-running series JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. It also includes the genga — the original hand-inked artwork — for the final page of Chiba Tetsuya's Ashita no Joe. Drawings by Itō Junji, by Agi Tadashi and Okimoto Shū, the creators of Drops of God, and by Tori Miki in collaboration with Yamazaki Mari on PLINIVS are also listed.
Costumes are welcome. The museum encourages cosplay, dressing up as characters, and asks visitors to leave props in the cloakroom, temporarily rebranded as “cos check”.
The timing follows strong sales abroad. Japan's Ministry of Economics, Trade and Industry reported the overseas market for manga reached ¥300bn in 2024. Publishing industry analyst BookScan reported manga outsold American superhero comics among US consumers in every year since 2018.
For fans, this means plenty of repeat visits. The museum launched a Fan Pass at Anime NYC that provides unlimited access to Art of Manga throughout its run, according to the Brooklyn Museum. Its Member Mornings programme offers early free entry for members.
