What is MangaComicsManga.com?
If you’ve found this site, welcome. This is the home for Deb Aoki’s archive of various articles from websites and apps that basically aren’t around anymore… or at least not how they were when I originally wrote this stuff.
I started writing about manga professionally in 2006 with About.com, and launched the About.com Manga website. When it started, About.com was a series of websites that were run by individual “experts” in different topics. There were About.com guides for history, travel, beauty, hobbies, books, movies and so much more. A friend of mine was a Beauty guide for About.com and recommended that I look at their list of topics they were looking for guides, and it just so happened that manga was one of those topics. I applied, and I got accepted to be the first (and I think only!) About.com Manga editor.
Running the About.com Manga site was a great way to start writing about comics professionally. About.com provided a lot of great tools and support. When I first joined About.com, it was owned by the New York Times. After that, it changed ownership a few times, and at a certain point, About.com and almost all of the articles and photos I posted on that site simply disappeared from the interwebz.
Some can still be found from the Internet Archive WayBack Machine, but with missing photos and links, and some just aren’t even saved in that format either. So take that as a cautionary tale — just because it’s on the internet once doesn’t mean it will be there forever.
Anyway, some of those articles are just pixel dust now — but the ones that I’ve been able to find, i’ll be trying to repost them here, on a site that I manage and control (albeit somewhat irregularly).
If you’d like to keep up with my more recent work and writing, I post things on my social media accounts:
X/Twitter: @debaoki
BlueSky: debaoki.bsky.social
Instagram: @debaoki
Also, if you haven’t already done so, do check out Mangasplaining — the podcast that I do with Christopher Woodrow-Butcher, Chip Zdarsky, and David Brothers. Christopher, David and I have a lot of fun introducing manga we love to Chip, who didn’t know much about manga when we started with episode 1, but now can recommend great manga to his comix pro pals, which is awesome.
I can’t promise that I’ll be posting a lot of articles here regularly, but just thought I’d leave this explanation for this site for people who might come across it, just like you. Thanks for reading, and read more manga!
-Deb Aoki