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

Kyoko Okazaki Genres: Josei Years Active: 80’s- 90’s Notable (Past) Works: Helter Skelter and Pink, which I covered here! Works Usually Include: Manga Centering Women, Women with Sexual Agency Upcoming Releases: English Translated Version of 1994’s River’s Edge Kyoko Okazaki is one of my favorite mangaka when it comes to Josei. Her work is perhaps most notable for presenting the complicated lives of girls and women on page. She is considered one of the mothers of the modern Josei genre from the 80s and 90s on. She lived like a rock star and started her career with genre blurring work, some erotic natured comics too. Some of her best-known work that has been translated in English are manga that act as social commentary on capitalism (Pink) and the fashion industry (Helter Skelter). Her manga creating days may have ended after a life altering car accident that happened in 1995 but her work lives on. As a mangaka, her work has received live action film adaptations (as recent as 2018, 2019, and 2020!), at least one fashion collab, and her past works are still being reprinted. I’m so happy that come later this year we’ll finally have an English translated version of her 1994 work, River’s Edge, which focuses on a group of teens and their tangled, complicated relationships when they discover an unknown corpse near the river. Here’s a link to a  short but superb piece on her manga by one of my favorite writers of the medium here.

Hiromu Arakawa Genres: Shonen Years Active: …