5 More Women Mangaka You Should Know for Women’s History Month

You love manga. I love manga. We all love manga. Writing about women mangaka for this month last year brought some eyeballs to the site and was fun to put together on my end, so I thought I’d bring it back again with five more. Happy Women’s History Month, here’s to more women mangaka to read and know about!

Yoshitoki Ōima Genres: Seinen Years Active: 2000’s-Current Notable (Past) Works: Mardock Scramble, A Silent Voice Works Usually Include: Emotional stories, characters questioning their morality, child characters Yoshitoki Oima was technically still a teenager when she started working on what would become the Eisner Nominated and Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize winning A Silent Voice manga. Captivating readers and audiences globally via its animated film adaptation, the series emphasized the power of the heartwarming and equally heart wrenching powers of Ōima’s masterful storytelling that we would see in later work of hers. The manga follows the lives of Shoyo who once tormented a hearing-impaired classmate, Shoko. It is a series that newer readers of manga have not just held as a standard for positive representation of disabled characters but some of their first, via the animated version as well. I come back to this manga especially when I want to see a series dedicated to not just the consequences of bullying but the struggles that disabled children have. I especially felt drawn to the solid themes of seeking forgiveness, exploring what atonement looks like for adolescen…