Ryan Holmberg is an independent art and comics historian, editor, and Japanese-English translator.
He is the author of The Translator Without Talent (Bubbles, 2020) and Garo Manga: The First Decade, 1964-1973 (Center for Book Arts, 2010). He has contributed numerous essays and reviews about art and comics to The Comics Journal, Artforum International, Art in America, and The New York Review. A Spanish selection of his writings will be published as Gekiga: Essays on Japanese Comics (Satori Ediciones, 2024).
As an editor and translator of manga, Ryan has worked with Drawn & Quarterly, New York Review Comics, Breakdown Press, Retrofit Comics, PictureBox, Floating World, Bubbles, Glacier Bay Books, and Living the Line on over three dozen books. His edition of Tezuka Osamu’s The Mysterious Underground Men(PictureBox) won the 2014 Eisner Award for Best U.S. Edition of International Material: Asia. Many of his books have been nominated for Eisners and other awards. He has served as an agent for such artists as Hayashi Seiichi, Tsuge Tadao, Baron Yoshimoto, and Yokoyama Yūichi. He has advised on manga-related exhibitions at the British Museum and the Honolulu Museum of Art.
Ryan has taught courses in Japanese, Asian, and Modern/Contemporary art and culture at numerous schools, including Duke University, University of Chicago, and the University of Tokyo, in both English and Japanese. He is currently a Senior Lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
You can find more of his work at https://mangaberg.com/