awards

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!!

/ ahorbinski
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 a rating or a short review on Amazon/Goodreads/Storygraph.

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!

Mechademia Kyoto + Comics Studies Society

/ ahorbinski

The schedule for the Mechademia Kyoto conference this weekend is now online, so I can confirm that I’ll be speaking on Saturday, giving my 2015 talk “A Children’s Empire: The Prewar ‘Media Mix’ of the Kodansha Club Magazines” a shiny post-PhD update. Registration is still available, and you should totally attend if you’ll be around.

I also heard yesterday that I received an honorable mention for the Comics Studies Society‘s inaugural Chute Award for Best Graduate Presentation for my talk  “Something Postmodern Going On: The Queering of the Manga Sphere in the 1970s,” given at the UC Berkeley CJS Graduate Conference last year. (The announcement initially said the mention had been given to my phantom twin brother, Andrew Horbinski, but he’s not the one with the PhD.)

I’m very grateful for the recognition, and I was also pleased to see that my Belgian colleague Benoît Crucifix has won the CSS Article prize for his article  “Cut-up and Redrawn: Charles Burns’s Swipe Files.” Sadly I have a prior commitment and won’t be able to attend the inaugural CSS Conference in August, but I hope to do so in the future.