Brooklyn Museum’s ‘Art of Manga’ Hangs 600-Plus Original Drawings, From One Piece to JoJo

Manga usually reaches you as ink on newsprint, but the Brooklyn Museum is hanging the pages the printers got. Art of Manga, which opened Oct. 3 in the museum’s Great Hall, collects more than 600 original works, and the layout follows manga’s own rule: you walk it from right to left, amNewYork reports.

The lineup runs from Chiba Tetsuya’s boxing classic Ashita no Joe to Araki Hirohiko’s JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, Oda Eiichiro’s One Piece, Takahashi Rumiko’s Inuyasha and Yamazaki Mari’s Thermae Romae, plus drawings by Itō Junji. Each section follows how a manga gets made, with hand-drawn pages, some digital ones and work that has never been published or shown. Curator Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere, who also curated the show’s earlier run at San Francisco’s Fine Arts Museums, says the originals tell you more than the printed page does.

It’s almost impossible to see the works that the artists use with the printers to publish their works, but when you see the actual drawings, you see so much more. You see what the artist intends, their line quality, the editor’s comments, it just takes you into a whole another aspect of manga, and they deserve to be seen.

Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere, curator, amNewYork

The timing helps anyone in town for the convention. The show opened five days before New York Comic Con takes over the Javits Center, according to Comic Crusaders. Rousmaniere points out that One Piece has run for almost 30 years and JoJo for almost 40, long enough that the series become part of readers’ lives.

Brooklyn has form here. Joan Cummins, the museum’s curatorial chair of Asian art, noted that it has staged shows on David Bowie, Spike Lee and fashion, so a hand-drawn medium made sense. She and Rousmaniere both want to retire the idea that manga is only for kids.

There is a manga for everyone and a really, really diverse range of subject matter and styles.

Joan Cummins, curatorial chair, Asian art, Brooklyn Museum, amNewYork

A companion display in the same hall, Manga Before Manga: Japanese Art from the Collection, traces the form’s older roots, per Time Out. Both run through Jan. 31, 2027.

Added to the High Grailed archive on October 11, 2026.