English Manga Vault

Welcome to English Manga Vault (EMV)! My name is rarenight, and I’m a manga archivist.

I believe long-term manga archival is important because digital availability of manga is ephemeral. Content is getting delisted all the time without warning. And even when you buy a digital version of a manga, you do not own an unrestricted copy; you own a license to access it, and that access can disappear.

There are real examples of digital manga stores going offline, including JManga in May 2013, Manga Planet in March 2026, and Tapas in March 2027. When stores and services like these disappear, customers lose access to their past purchases. There is no assurance that a store you use today will continue offering the same access years or decades from now.

The future availability of piracy sites is not guaranteed either, especially as enforcement increases and online access becomes more restricted. Recent events have shown that we need to start thinking about preserving manga now more than ever.

That’s where English Manga Vault comes in. EMV catalogs the filenames, file sizes and SHA-1 hashes of extant licensed English manga files in XML-based DAT files so collectors can independently build and verify their own English manga collections.

The goal here is to bring to manga preservation the same metadata-driven approach popularized by video game ROM cataloging projects such as No-Intro and Redump. This approach supports true, long-term, decentralized manga preservation for decades to come.

English Manga Vault focuses on cataloging Japanese manga that has been licensed for release by western publishers and officially translated into English for international distribution. EMV uses Madokami, which is a private server dedicated to aggregating English manga of all sorts, as its backend for cataloging licensed English manga.

Madokami also aggregates a variety of English fan translations, and English Manga Vault includes them by association, but does not prioritize cataloging them. English Manga Vault also generally avoids cataloging manhua, manhwa, webtoons, western comic books, western graphic novels, and hentai, except for those which have been incidentally added to Madokami.

Licensed English manga comprise only about 5% of the total manga that's out there, which is still an immense amount of content that would last multiple lifetimes of nonstop reading. According to MangaBaka, there were 12,828 brand new manga series debuting in just 2025 alone! You would have to read 36 series a day to keep up with the sheer pace of new material. In that sense, English Manga Vault focusing on licensed English manga is a matter of practicality more than anything, as truly preserving all manga ever created would take hundreds of terabytes of storage.

Focusing on licensed English manga provides a general baseline of quality within English Manga Vault, as the highest-quality manga tend to get localized internationally, and their localization has a basic assurance of quality and consistency being adapted into western markets by a team of JLPT-proficient translators. EMV provides a solid representative preservation of manga as an artistic literary medium and showcases the full history of manga's rise in the west over the past 30 years. My objective here is to build a curated vault of material rather than hoard everything in existence. Less is more here.