appearances

Featured A Will Eisner Award statuette with the plaque bearing the category and work title, placed in front of a copy of Manga's Frist Century with the gold "Will Eisner Award" winner sticker placed on the cover.

Eisner Award WINNER!!

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A Will Eisner Award statuette with the plaque bearing the category and work title, placed in front of a copy of Manga's First Century with the gold "Will Eisner Award" winner sticker placed on the cover.

I’m proud and delighted to say that Manga’s First Century won the 2026 Eisner Award for Best Academic/Scholarly Work on Friday night! I was able to attend the ceremony at SDCC and had an excellent time. Aside from the people I thanked in my speech, thank you as well to the people who saw the leaked results online before the ceremony and didn’t tell me about them. (The first I heard of the leak was when I sat down at my banquet table for the ceremony, and I didn’t look before the results for my category were announced.)

Full results are available on the Eisner Awards website. Congratulations again to all the winners and nominees, it was another excellent year for comics!

And as always, if you enjoyed Manga’s First Century, it really helps the book’s visibility if you can leave even a short review on Amazon/Goodreads/Storygraph.

Event at Books with Pictures

/ ahorbinski

I’ll be at Books with Pictures in Portland, Oregon on Sunday, May 31 for a book event! Books with Pictures is a great store and I’m thrilled to be doing an event there. It’s at 3:30pm in the garden (Instagram post with details). I hope to see you there!

Also, if you’ve read Manga’s First Century, it would be great if you could leave a review on the Amazon page. More reviews really do help the book’s visibility in the almighty algorithm. Thank you!

Eisner Award nominee + JAMS@Anime Expo

/ ahorbinski
Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards logo on a background of the San Diego Comic Con logo.

I’m thrilled to say that Manga’s First Century is a 2026 Eisner Award Nominee, in the Best Academic/Scholarly Work category. Thank you so much to the judges, and to my editor Enrique Ochoa-Kaup. Congratulations to all the nominees!

While I won’t be at SDCC, I will be at Anime Expo in Los Angeles. Specifically, I’ll be at the JAMS@AX Academic Symposium, speaking on July 2, 2026, as part of the “Representations of History, and History in Anime” panel. I’m very much looking forward to being back at AX, and I hope to see you there!

CasaCon 2025

/ ahorbinski

Thanks to everyone who came to my talk at ULB in Brussels last week. Next up, on December 14 at 1pm Pacific, I’ll be speaking at CasaCon 2025 on “Framing Fans in Manga History: Manga’s First Century.”

CasaCon is free to join and all online, taking place on Discord! You can register to join the con now and check out all the other great programming on the website. I look forward to seeing you there!

Sidewise Awards

/ ahorbinski

As announced on File 770 a few days ago, I’m excited to be one of the three new judges joining the Sidewise Awards jury. I’ll start reading books for the 2026 awards year. As a history nerd, I’ve always been a fan of alternate history, and I’m excited to have the excuse to really dig into the subgenre and highlight exciting works in it. I hope to see you at Worldcon and World Fantasy in 2026! And if you’re looking to read one great work of alternate history, I highly recommend the 2025 winner Sargassa by Sophie Burnham, or the classic Fire on the Mountain by Terry Bisson.

Also, I was interviewed last month for this article in The New Republic on the One Piece flag at protests.

Manga’s First Century out next week in North America + events!

/ ahorbinski

Manga’s First Century is out next Tuesday, October 28, in North America, and copies are starting to ship from warehouses. You can still preorder a copy!

For those who have read the book, please do consider leaving a review on Amazon or Goodreads. Reviews help the book get noticed by the algorithm so that more people can find out about its existence.

For those with tight budgets (and isn’t that all of us these days), please do consider requesting your local library purchase the book for their collection. A purchase request means the book will be available to everyone in your library system and beyond.

Events!

I’m thrilled to announce that I’ll be doing an AMA on r/askhistorians next Wednesday, October 29. Starting at 9am Eastern, you can ask me your questions about manga history and I’ll respond over the course of the day.

I’ll also be giving a book talk in Brussels in the last week of November, and I’ll probably be doing some more events in the Bay Area in winter 2026. Stay tuned!