Eike Exner

@eikeexner

Striphistoricus writing on Japanese comics and the history of the comics medium. More about my work at eikeexner.com. Name's pronounced Eye-kuh X-ner / アイケ・エクスナ.

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Eike Exner@eikeexner· 20d

Texted back Stop2End to end America's relationship with Israel

Text message that says "Hey, it's Kate. Curious what you think about America's relationship with Israel today. Can we chat? Stop2End"

Eike Exner@eikeexner· 21d

Your Monday mornings face are for thinking hands again

Eike Exner@eikeexner· 25d

The right-wing mind is a wonder to behold. The book reviewed here is John Dower's War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, in which the author goes to great lengths detailing Japanese war crimes, but also quotes racist and exterminationist rhetoric by Americans.

Two star review of John Dower's War Without Mercy that says: "This book seemed to be hell-bent and determined to paint the United States, white America specifically, as racist warmongerers who were out to wipe non-whites in the Pacific off the face of the Earth. I had trouble staying focused on the material because it was so saturated with a racial setting. I'm not too surprised by Dower's sentiment, considering his wife is Japanese. But, this is the typical style of book that is being pushed in academia. Sigh."

Eike Exner@eikeexner· Jul 10

young me on weekends in tokyo

Fuku-chan and friends on the "train" (mosquito net), with Fuku announcing, "next stop: nichome"

Eike Exner@eikeexner· Jul 9

Never would've guessed that Korean would be the first language that work of mine would be translated into. And yes, that is the cover of the book on comics history that my article is included in why do you ask workroompress.kr/product/2197...

Korean text mentioning an "Eike Exner" and books on "manga"

Eike Exner@eikeexner· Jul 8

Honored and happy to find out that Manga: A New History of Japanese Comics has been named one of two runners-up for the SHARP Book History Book Prize: sharpweb.org/grants-prize...

Highly Commended

Literature’s Refuge: Rewriting the Mediterranean Borderscape (Princeton University Press) by William Stroebel takes its readers on a fascinating journey of textual recovery, of refugee and diasporic literature resulting from the Greco-Turkish Population Exchange of 1923. The texts and languages violently displaced from their geographical and cultural moorings have nevertheless survived in scraps and fragments and ultimately find ‘refuge’ in Stroebel’s book. Stroebel is an inventive, self-reflective critic who looks for effaced narratives ‘in the cracks’ of history. Literature’s Refuge makes a remarkable intellectual contribution across languages and boundaries and exudes the sense of new work being done in new ways.

Manga: A New History of Japanese Comics (Yale University Press) by Eike Exner offers a richly researched and engagingly written account of Japanese comics, tracing Japanese comics from the late 19th-century through to the contemporary, with an excellent sense of the global manifestations of this form. The formal evolution of manga remains largely untheorised, and its publishing infrastructure understudied. Exner’s book is a substantive corrective. Balancing cultural history with close attention to particular titles, Manga will become an indispensable resource for anyone working within comic studies, and an eye-opening introduction for those new to the field.

Eike Exner@eikeexner· Jul 7

Huh, I'd never seen ン・ん used as an initial N sound before. (From Tagawa Suiho's Madono Yukio-san in Shojo Kurabu, 1937). Nnaaruhodo.

Eike Exner@eikeexner· Jul 6

Yay! Very grateful to @cssorg.bsky.social for the Comics Studies Society's 2026 Article Prize. Read the now-award-winning article here: seika.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/20001...

Certificate of Comics Studies Society 2026 Article Prize

Eike Exner@eikeexner· Jul 3

Our government is now misusing postal service funds to run advertisements for AI

United States Postal Service: Effective AI (heart emoji) starts with Smarter Strategy

Eike Exner@eikeexner· Jun 25

Oscar Jacobsson's Adamson used to advertise an at-home printing device in 1931 in Shonen Kurabu, the magazine that serialized Tagawa Suiho's Norakuro.

Eike Exner@eikeexner· Jun 24

Episode 13 of "Panta's Adventures," from 1934, by "Natsukawa Hachiro" (Yanase Masamu, who was being persecuted for his leftist politics and started to use this alias in the 1930s). 1) "First a tsunami and now an earthquake." 2) "This time the ground rising up instead."

Eike Exner@eikeexner· Jun 23

Why is every Youtube video like this now

Shitty youtube thumbnail with two AI-generated-looking children in old-timey European dress, separated by a neon-blue DNA helix. The video is titled "DNA Reveals the BASQUES Weren’t Who We Thought"

Eike Exner@eikeexner· Jun 22

Japanese bookseller in 1941: "The comics form works best for children. It's because it's like watching a talkie." Me in 2026: "I'm always saying this!!"

Eike Exner@eikeexner· Jun 21

Just learned that apparently by 1939 there was a book-length Arsène Lupin manga... Crazy to think about how many works from the 1930s and 1940s have been lost.

Eike Exner@eikeexner· Jun 20

The same article/interview also features this fascinating image, which I'll have to look for next time I'm at the National Diet Library. It's an ad for "King Manga" in an industry newspaper, presumably paid for by King Features to advertise its comics to editors of Japanese periodicals.

Eike Exner@eikeexner· Jun 20

Some French people in 1937 were better informed about the origins of manga than most people today: (found by @juliapopek.bsky.social)

12 panel episode of the comic strip Bringing Up Father in the Japanese periodical Asahi Graph, reprinted in a French periodical.

Eike Exner@eikeexner· Jun 14

I worried I might be having a stroke reading the highlighted phrase, very curious how this happened

Book passage that includes the phrase "Of not 'or' course,"

Eike Exner@eikeexner· Jun 14

Yeah, and weren't carrier pigeons an early form of the Internet, if you really, REALLY think about it?

I happened to be reading these books while visiting the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. Admiring the art of the New Kingdom by day and reading the history of manga by the Nile at night made me wonder whether the processions of panels that adorn the tombs of pharaohs and Egyptian nobles were not, after all, the earliest form of manga? Were those layered silhouettes and the sunlight rays falling on Akhenaten and Nefertiti an early form of the depiction of motion?

Eike Exner@eikeexner· Jun 13

Help I'm a man and yet being mansplained to

This is Exner’s version of the manga origin story, and I don’t find it completely convincing. He thinks that it is a mistake to see the essence of comics as “a combination of image and text”, and eschews any connection between narrative comics and earlier traditions, arguing that the word “manga” was simply transferred from whimsical sketches to a different category of objects. He also treats as irrelevant centuries of sophisticated melding of text and image in the woodblock-printed books of the Edo period (1603– 1867). To my mind, what seems to have happened in the late nineteenth century is that Japan experienced a kind of media Reformation, in which woodblock printing was abandoned and typeset adopted instead. This entailed the introduction of a graphic template borrowed from foreign media, allowing back onto the page only “modern” imagery.

Eike Exner@eikeexner· Jun 13

This is how a "property entrepreneur and expert on Japan" summarizes my new book for @thetls.bsky.social. Small problem: the book doesn't say that "Okamoto developed the concept of Euro-American cartooning in magazines such as Tokyo Puck," in part because Okamoto never worked for Tokyo Puck.

Imaizumi eventually passed on the baton to Yasuji Kitazawa, and later Ippei Okamoto, who developed the concept of Euro-American cartooning in magazines such as Tokyo Puck and the Asahi Shimbun daily newspaper. The spread of the phonograph in the 1890s encouraged the insertion of speech bubbles, and the rise of motion pictures rapidly advanced the artist’s concept of how a story could be told over multiple frames.

Eike Exner@eikeexner· Jun 12

Gee I wonder why on the eve of the SpaceX IPO, noted financial crimes facilitator PricewaterhouseCoopers is paying for sponsored content boosting the idea of "Data Centers in Space"

Instagram ad for a podcast by noted transphobe mag "The Atlantic," with the topic "Data Centers in Space," paid for by notorious crime facilitator "PricewaterhouseCoopers."

Eike Exner@eikeexner· Jun 10

I finished @zevhandel.bsky.social 's Chinese Characters Across Asia and wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone interested in the history of writing in East Asia. I expected the book to be fairly dry but it was a very enjoyable read, written for a general audience of non-linguists.

Eike Exner@eikeexner· Jun 9

Don't you need to disclose when you're being paid to run content?

SpaceX also touted a $23 trillion market opportunity it says awaits its artificial intelligence offerings, adding it is the only company that can escape the limitations of earthbound businesses and use space to build AI compute capacity that it expects to draw ⁠enormous demand in the future.

Eike Exner@eikeexner· Jun 9

At least the Fortune piece shows why publications should want to have a human editor

while providing exemptions for "clearly non-hazardous and pose no credible threat to public health and safety."

Eike Exner@eikeexner· Jun 7

I enjoy seeing the local people here express their rich and fascinating culture

Vanity truck decal that says "don't touch my truck," with a stick figure holding a handgun to the head of another stick figure that is on all fours.

Eike Exner@eikeexner· Jun 6

Was already looking forward to reading this book but did not expect it to so directly intersect with my own field of work :-)

Cover of the book Chinese Characters Across Asia by Zev Handel

Dragon Ball page reproduced on a page from Chinese Characters Across Asia

Eike Exner@eikeexner· Jun 4

And because how could it not, the book also features the mighty KI SHO TEN KETSU (pronounced like Goku says KAMEHAMEHA), aka "the basic formula for story development in manga" (a claim invented by Okamoto Ippei in 1927):

Eike Exner@eikeexner· Jun 4

"The form was developed in Japan in the early twentieth century *in tandem with* comics from abroad." It... is literally the same form... Like, Aso Yutaka has literally said so in writing. His editor told him to draw sonething like Bringing Up Father...

Eike Exner@eikeexner· Jun 4

The exhibition curator and editor of the volume, always more than willing to write whatever pleases the donors, even asserts that modern manga is connected to the Edo period because of the existence of publishers back then and today (not even the same publishers, just the fact of their existence):