Shintaro Kago's 'Blood Harvest' Short Story Manga Wins Eisner Award
Kago's win marks the first Eisner for the artist, whose surreal and grotesque short-form work has long been a cult favorite in translated manga.
Reporting from 1 source: Anime News Network.
Shintaro Kago's short story "Blood Harvest" from the Brain Damage collection won the Eisner Award for Best Short Story at the 2026 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards. The same book's "The Curse Room" was also nominated. The awards were announced Friday evening during San Diego Comic-Con 2026.
Shintaro Kago's "Blood Harvest" took the Eisner Award for Best Short Story at the 2026 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, announced Friday evening during San Diego Comic-Con. The story appears in the Brain Damage collection, published by an unnamed imprint and translated by Zack Davisson. Kago's "The Curse Room," from the same book, was also a nominee in the category.
In the Best U.S. Edition of International Material-Asia category, Sanho's Purgatory Funeral Cakes won. Dark Horse Comics published the work, with translation by Danny Lim. The category's other nominees included Keigo Shinzo's Hirayasumi, Kazumi Yamashita's Land, Keigo Shinzo's Tokyo Alien Bros., and Chang Sheng's Yan comic.
Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira, released by Kodansha USA as a hardcover collecting volumes 1-5, won Best Archival/Collection Project. Andrea Horbinski's Manga's First Century won Best Academic/Scholarly Work. Manga creator Go Nagai and Akira Toriyama were inducted into the Eisner Hall of Fame.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.
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