12 manga like Chōjū-jinbutsu-giga

1. Caran d'Ache: Collected Drawings

by Caran d'Ache

• Comedy (shared)

Wordless picture stories from Paris in the 1880s, told in strict panel sequence so the joke lands without a caption. He took his name from the Russian word for pencil, and he is the reason the story without words became a form.

2. Frederick Burr Opper: Collected Cartoons

by Frederick Burr Opper

• Comedy (shared)

Single-panel work from the man who drew Happy Hooligan — magazine cartoons, political drawings and book illustration, from the years when the newspaper comic was still being invented around him.

3. Wilhelm Busch: Picture Stories

by Wilhelm Busch

• Comedy (shared)

The rest of Busch — drunks, monks, cats, painters and children, most of them punished. Picture and verse locked together on the page thirty years before anyone thought to call the arrangement a comic.

4. Emakimono: Picture Scrolls

by Various

Painted handscrolls from medieval Japan, read by unrolling with one hand and rolling up with the other. Scene runs into scene with no frame between them, which is a way of handling time that comics spent centuries rediscovering.

5. Hokusai Manga

by Katsushika Hokusai

Fifteen volumes of sketches — swordsmen, bathers, birds, ghosts, people pulling faces — printed from woodblocks. This is the book that put the word manga into circulation, a century before the form existed.

6. Rodolphe Töpffer: Picture Stories

by Rodolphe Töpffer

• Adventure
• Comedy (shared)

A Geneva schoolmaster drew absurd little travel stories for his pupils in the 1830s, in panels, with the text underneath carrying the timing. Goethe read them and approved. They are usually called the first comics.

7. Ban Dainagon Ekotoba

by Attributed to Tokiwa Mitsunaga

• Drama

A twelfth-century handscroll about a courtier accused of burning down a palace gate. Unrolled right to left, the crowd runs, the rumour spreads and the accusation lands — a story told by moving the reader along the paper.

8. Toba-e

by Various

• Comedy (shared)

Eighteenth-century comic picture books of long-limbed figures falling over each other, named after the monk credited with the frolicking-animals scrolls. Cheap, printed in quantity, and sold to be laughed at rather than kept.

9. Ally Sloper

by Charles H. Ross

• Comedy (shared)
• Slice of Life

A red-nosed London schemer who slopes up the alley when the rent is due. The first comic character to carry his own magazine and to be sold as merchandise — he was on mugs before anybody had thought that through.

10. The Yellow Kid

by Richard F. Outcault

• Comedy (shared)
• Slice of Life

A bald child in a yellow nightshirt, standing in a tenement alley with words printed across the shirt instead of a speech balloon. Histories of the newspaper comic usually start here, and the colour of that shirt is where the phrase yellow journalism came from.

11. House of Five Leaves

by Natsume Ono

• Drama
• Mystery

A skilled but painfully shy ronin accepts work as a bodyguard from a charismatic stranger. The job brings him into the orbit of a kidnapping group with complicated motives and concealed histories. In Edo's quieter corners, trust develops slowly between people who have reasons to hide.

12. The Elusive Samurai

by Yusei Matsui

• Action
• Comedy (shared)
• Drama

Japan, 1333. When the Kamakura shogunate falls, young Tokiyuki Hojo, heir to the ruling family, loses everything in a single day. His one talent is running away. With the help of an eccentric priest, he turns fleeing into a way to fight back — a lively historical adventure based on a real figure.