A collage of Jiji Manga covers retrieved from the University Libraries’ Digital Collections
Inspired by American-style newspaper comic supplements, Jiji Manga was one of Japan’s first modern comic strips. It featured cartoons by Kitazawa Rakuten (北澤楽天) and his contemporaries, translations of foreign comics, as well as puzzles, photographs, and editorial articles. The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum holds 476 of the 504 published volumes—making it one of the most complete runs in the world.
To help make this remarkable resource more discoverable, our library launched the Jiji Manga Wiki over fifteen years ago (a project still in progress). This past summer, thanks to the dedicated efforts of student workers Anqi Chen and Joseph Santiago, many gaps in the Wiki were finally filled. Their careful reading of prewar, non-standardized Japanese texts has allowed us to add complete contents transcriptions for almost every volume of the magazine—bringing us closer than ever to completion.
