12 manga like Toba-e

1. Chōjū-jinbutsu-giga

by Attributed to Toba Sōjō

• Comedy (shared)

Rabbits, frogs and monkeys wrestling, bathing and holding a funeral, brushed onto handscrolls in the twelfth century. Japan often calls it the oldest manga: no words, a running story, read right to left.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. A Man and His Cat

by Sakurai Umi

• Slice of Life

A lonely older man walks into a pet shop and takes home the plump kitten nobody else wanted. They take to each other at once. Told by both the man and the cat, a warm, funny story about two lives that were missing each other.

8. Red Cat Ramen

by Angyaman

• Comedy (shared)
• Slice of Life

Red Cat Ramen is a popular ramen shop run entirely by cats — and one tiger. Shiro Tamako, a human who loves cats, gets a job there brushing them. A warm, funny workplace comedy about running a small business, with fur.

9. Learning to Love My Cat-like Classmate

by Akinoko

• Comedy (shared)
• Romance
• Slice of Life

Timid Minato is asked to look after Nekozane, the girl who naps through every class at the next desk. When he finally wakes her, she hugs him. A sweet story of two shy teenagers becoming friends, and slowly more.

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. Silver Spoon

by Hiromu Arakawa

• Comedy (shared)
• Drama
• Slice of Life

Yuugo Hachiken enrols at an agricultural high school hoping to leave academic pressure behind. Instead, he encounters early mornings, demanding animals and classmates who already know what they want from life. Farm work and unexpected friendships push him to question where food comes from and what kind of future he wants.