Historical Gekiga

From the upheavals at the end of the Later Han through the three kingdoms to Jin's unification. Sixty volumes based on Eiji Yoshikawa's version, and the work that settled how Japanese readers picture the Three Kingdoms.

Based on Eiji Yoshikawa's Musashi, on a swordsman's life and what strength is for. Overwhelming brushwork lifted period gekiga to a new height.

The life of Eumenes, a scribe of ancient Greece. A meticulous historical epic by Hitoshi Iwaaki, the author of Parasyte.

America, 1890, and a race across the continent. A competition for the parts of a corpse, and a reset of the whole world of the series. Many call it the best, with Araki's drawing and structure at full maturity.

An alternate history in which the roles of the sexes are reversed and the shogun is a woman. Widely praised for its careful period research and its thinking about gender.

The life of Furuta Oribe, a warlord who tried to survive the Warring States not by arms but by suki — tea and beauty. Comic in his helplessness before great lords and famous tea vessels, and abnormal in his attachment to beauty, it brought aesthetics into historical manga as a subject.

11th-century Scandinavia, where the young Thorfinn, living for revenge, slowly turns into a true warrior. A Viking epic grounded in history.

Ancient China at the end of the Warring States period, where the servant boy Xin sets out to become a great general. A vast war chronicle and ensemble drama, and one of the biggest hits a seinen magazine has had.

Lucius, a bath engineer of ancient Rome, keeps slipping forward into modern Japanese baths. Flattened by the flat-faced tribe's technology, he takes each idea home — a comparative-culture comedy that does history and civilisation entirely through bathing.

Hokkaido in the late Meiji years, where an ex-soldier and an Ainu girl chase a hoard of gold. An adventure like no other, packed with Ainu culture, hunting, food and comedy.

Maomao, a girl who solves incidents in the rear palace with her knowledge of medicine. A huge hit as a Chinese-style mystery in adaptation.

Hojo Tokiyuki, a boy who loses everything when the Kamakura shogunate falls, aims for the top armed only with his one talent: running away. Yusei Matsui turned the Nanboku-cho period, long thought unglamorous, into a battlefield for boys' manga.