As a comic and manga fan I love looking at original artwork. The creative process is always so fascinating and, as a creative person, getting to see behind the scenes is always just as exciting as the final product. Luckily there are a lot of images and videos available showing the process, behind-the-scenes, and the original artwork of comics and graphic novels. But for manga, not so much. That’s why my recent discovery was so exciting for me.
Google Arts & Culture is not new to me. I’ve had a look at it in the past and thought it was great. But for some reason, I never thought of doing a search for manga. Until recently when I found a few articles on various manga or manga creators. And then I searched further and found the page of the Yokote Masuda Manga Museum. The museum holds the most manga originals in the world. Here’s an article about the museum: https://artsandculture.google.com/story/VgXBvGqiDJyPJg
The great thing about the Arts & Culture page is that the artwork is super high resolution. You can zoom right in to get an extremely close-up look at the artwork. On the manga pages you can see the ink, the whiteout, the screentones, everything. It’s fantastic to see.
The museums page states that there are 71641 images to look at. It’s incredible. One creator who seems to have the most amount of artwork available is Takao Yaguchi and the manga series ‘Fisherman Sanpei’. I love it. If there is ever an English publication of this series I will definitely buy it. Have a look at this gallery for a few examples of his incredible artwork (as well as the awesome close-ups).
A fan favourite series is ‘Lone Wolf and Cub’, written by Kazuo Koike and illustrated by Goseki Kojima. On the Yokote Masuda Manga Museum page, you can view over 12000 original pages by Goseki Kojima. Here are a few examples:
It is definitely worth checking out if you’re a comic or manga fan.
Kev
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