When Did We The People First Appear In Manga Or Graphic Novels?

I like to sum this up like a backward panorama: today’s comics and graphic novels inherit a visual language built over millennia. Modern graphic novels, with their detailed human psychology and long arcs, grew from 19th-century picture stories and much older traditions — think medieval tapestries, Japanese emakimono, and illustrational satirical prints. 'Hokusai Manga' gave Japan an early model of printed sequential sketches, while in the West 'The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck' offered an early long-form picture narrative. The 20th century then formalized practices: cinematic framing, panel-to-panel timing, and the adult realism of postwar movements.

So people have been appearing in sequential art for a very long time, shifting roles from allegories and caricatures to deeply drawn protagonists. That ongoing evolution makes every new comic feel like part of a huge conversation across time, which is why I keep collecting and rereading old and new works alike — it’s endlessly satisfying to watch how faces and crowds are drawn and reimagined.

I get a real kick out of tracing how people — ordinary crowds, heroes, and everyman figures — show up in sequential art. If you squint, the idea of representing people in a sequence goes back centuries: Egyptian murals and the Bayeux Tapestry told stories with panels long before the word 'comics' existed. In Japan, the word 'manga' itself became attached to the art form through works like 'Hokusai Manga' in the early 1800s, where everyday figures and humorous scenes were packed into sketchbooks that read like visual diaries. In the West, one of the earliest proto-comics often cited is 'The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck' (1837), which presented a full narrative in sequential pictures — people, their gestures, and interactions were the core of the storytelling.

Fast forward into the 20th century and you see the modern forms crystallizing. In Japan, artists like Osamu Tezuka transformed how people moved and emote on the page, while in the US and Europe the long-form idea evolved into what we now call graphic novels — Will Eisner's 'A Contract with God' (1978) is often pointed to as a milestone. Across all these shifts, the common thread is simple: humans are central. Whether it's a political cartoon’s caricatured crowd or a quiet panel showing a single person on a train, sequential art maps social life. I find it amazing how those early sketches still echo in the faces and gestures we read today, and that continuity delights me every time I flip through an old volume.

Thinking about the question from a social angle, I find the earliest appearance of people in graphic narratives is less a single moment and more a long, global arc. Political cartoons in 18th- and 19th-century newspapers treated 'the people' as characters in public debates; British magazines like 'Punch' used crowd images and citizen archetypes to make broad commentary. In Japan, picture storytelling traditions — emakimono scrolls and later illustrated books — already staged scenes crowded with merchants, samurai, and peasants long before modern comic magazines existed.

Then the 20th century brought different kinds of representation. Postwar manga and the gekiga movement deliberately focused on adult, everyday experiences: creators like Yoshihiro Tatsumi and others depicted the struggles of ordinary people, while works such as 'Barefoot Gen' put civilians and their suffering at the center of the narrative. That shift is crucial because it shows a move from people-as-symbols to people-as-complex-subjects. I find that transition really compelling; it’s where the medium grew up and started reflecting real lives in ways that still resonate when I reread those pieces.

It's wild to trace how long 'we the people' — meaning everyday folks, crowds, citizens, and the mob — have been showing up in sequential art; it's basically as old as storytelling in pictures. If you push back past the word 'manga' or 'graphic novel' to the roots of visual narratives, you run into things like Egyptian murals, the Bayeux Tapestry, and the Roman Trajan's Column, all of which depict groups of people and civic life. In Japan, the emakimono picture-scroll tradition and playful 12th–13th century works like 'Chōju-jinbutsu-giga' portray animals acting like humans but also give us vivid scenes of everyday life and social satire — proto-manga energy for sure. Those early sequential images are where you can see the idea of the crowd, the family, the city-dweller playing out visually long before the modern terms existed.

Moving into the modern era, the concept of ordinary people in comics and graphic novels becomes easier to pin down. In the West, 19th-century political cartoons and newspaper comic strips started showing urban life and the concerns of the public — think of pieces like 'The Yellow Kid' from the 1890s, which captured urban kids and the crowded tenement world. That was an early comic-strip look at 'the people' as characters, social subjects, and sometimes punchlines. In Japan, modern manga developed out of satirical and pictorial traditions of the Meiji period; pioneers like Rakuten Kitazawa and later Osamu Tezuka built a medium where both extraordinary heroes and ordinary people could take center stage. Postwar manga especially began to center civilians and societal trauma: Keiji Nakazawa's 'Barefoot Gen' is a gut-wrenching example of civilians — 'the people' — suffering and surviving through war, and Tezuka's sprawling works often mix the personal and the societal.

When the question is about the literal phrase 'We the People', that specific Constitutional wording is a Western political phrasing and shows up in political cartoons and comics that tackle democracy, rights, and protest, but tracing the exact first comic to use the phrase is tricky without a special archive search. What matters culturally is that graphic storytelling has long used groups and publics as dramatic forces: from mobs and revolutions in 19th-century cartoons to crowd dynamics in 'V for Vendetta' and the societal breakdowns and civic struggles in manga like 'Akira' and 'Attack on Titan'. Will Eisner's 'A Contract with God' and other mid-20th-century graphic novels also brought ordinary lives into the center of sequential storytelling in a way that the medium hadn't always done before.

So, if you're asking when 'we the people' first appeared in manga or graphic novels, the honest fun answer is: they've been there from the start in one form or another — in ancient picture narratives, in ukiyo-e and emakimono, and in the modern comic strips and graphic novels of the 19th and 20th centuries. The medium has always been great at showing crowds, citizens, and the small human dramas that make societies tick, and I love that the tradition continues to evolve, still making room for the everyday alongside the epic.