Art of Manga: Brooklyn Museum Hangs the Drawings

Manga is usually read as a printed page, small and fast and thrown away with the issue. The Brooklyn Museum's Art of Manga starts one step earlier, with the original drawings the printed pages were made from. Its first-floor Great Hall holds more than 600 of them. The show opened on Oct. 3 and runs through Jan. 31, 2027.

According to Musa Guide's listing, this is the East Coast debut of the first major exhibition in the Americas on manga as an art form. The listing says it includes work from series such as Inuyasha, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure and One Piece. The sections below rely on that listing, not on a visit, so they describe the plan of the show and leave its effect to the viewer.

Why the drawings matter

The Japanese word for these originals is genga, and the show's premise, as the listing describes it, is that they are art in their own right. A printed page flattens line, erasure and the mark of the pen. The original keeps them. Hung on a wall, a page becomes a drawing with a hand behind it.

Musa Guide describes an introduction to manga history that leads to Chiba Tetsuya and Akatsuka Fujio. Eight artists then get a section each, among them Oda, Takahashi, Tagame and Taniguchi. The final section shows Shueisha Manga-Art Heritage prints, including works from One Piece, Rose of Versailles and Bleach.

The design takes a position on how manga is read. The galleries run right to left, like a volume. Printed books, supplied by the bookseller Kinokuniya, sit in the middle of the space for handling. A visitor can look at a drawing on the wall and then pick up the book it became.

Three things to look for

The listing singles out three objects.

The first is a life-sized, 12-panel painting by Hirohiko Araki from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, built so a visitor can imagine standing inside the story's landscape. It is the first thing a visitor meets after the entrance, and it announces the show's scale.

The second is the last page of Ashita no Joe by Chiba Tetsuya, the original final-page artwork of the boxing series, which Musa Guide says is rarely exhibited outside Japan. A last page is the most loaded sheet in any serial. Seeing it on a wall is a different act from reading it in a collected edition.

The third is an unfinished late self-portrait by Taniguchi Jiro, lent outside Japan for the first time by his widow. A self-portrait left incomplete carries its own weight, and the loan is a significant gesture from a family.

A museum that expects costumes

The entrance carries a joke that is also a policy. The coat check has been renamed CosCheck, because cosplay is welcome and props need somewhere to go. The museum's host is not pretending that a manga audience is the usual art-museum audience. It has built the logistics around the fans who will come in wigs.

The museum is planning for its audience, not lecturing it.

Practical details

Timed tickets start at $30 for adults and include general admission, with entry every 15 minutes from 11 a.m. and last entry at 5 p.m. The museum is open Wednesday to Sunday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., and closed Monday and Tuesday. A $75 Manga Fan Pass covers two people for unlimited visits. Children 3 and under are free, ages 4 to 12 pay $12 and teens pay $21. Stroller tours run, and a guide character named Da Beshi leads children.

The museum is at 200 Eastern Parkway in Prospect Heights, and Musa Guide lists the 2 and 3 train at Eastern Parkway-Brooklyn Museum as the nearest stop. A companion show, Manga Before Manga: Japanese Art from the Collection, opened the same day. It brings 21 works from the collection that trace 900 years of Japanese narrative imagery behind modern manga.

Parents should note one caution from the listing. Some of the work is written for adults, on gender roles and inequality, and the curators call tweens and teens the sweet spot. The listing also gives a plain warning to anyone expecting a conventional art show: it is mostly drawings, more than 600 of them, so those who want paintings or sculpture may be disappointed.

What it adds to New York's season

The Brooklyn Museum also has Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses on view through Dec. 6. A visitor can fit a drawing show and a couture show into one afternoon. The mix is the point. New York's museums are showing, in the same month, a book-art exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, a Pop retrospective at the Whitney and a manga show in Brooklyn. Together they treat the printed and the drawn page as serious ground.

The show also asks a question the museum cannot answer on its own. If a manga page deserves the wall, what else printed does? The answer will come from who walks in, and from what they carry out.

FAQ

When is Art of Manga on view at the Brooklyn Museum?

Oct. 3, 2026 through Jan. 31, 2027.

How much are tickets?

Timed tickets start at $30 for adults. A $75 Manga Fan Pass covers two people for unlimited visits.

What is a genga?

The term for the original drawings from which printed manga pages are made. The show displays more than 600 of them.

Is it suitable for children?

The museum offers children's pricing and stroller tours, but the listing notes that some work is written for adults, and curators call tweens and teens the sweet spot.

Sources

*Cover photo: Cabinet Public Relations Office, Government of Japan, Wikimedia Commons, *[*https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tetsuya_Chiba_20231101.jpg*](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tetsuya_Chiba_20231101.jpg)* (CC BY 4.0).*