English Manga Vault

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

I believe 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 and Manga Planet in March 2026. When services like this 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 a XML-based DAT file so collectors can independently build and verify their own 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 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. In the future I may further curate EMV to only contain official material, but given the challenges of parsing it out, English Manga Vault will remain a full mirror of Madokami for the forseeable future.

I generally avoid cataloging of Japanese raws or English fan translations beyond what exists in Madokami because the amount of manga created in Japan is truly limitless, and that sort of boundless scope is very challenging to wrangle. With the advent of generative AI that allows self-published creators to generate panels, and with programs like Koharu that auto-generate English fan translations, the amount of content out there has been surging as of late. I personally don't have the resources to manually curate manga beyond what already exists in Madokami.

Also, English Manga Vault excludes English fan translations of hentai from English Manga Vault to avoid liability over unsavory content and because I don't see value to its preservation.

English Manga Vault also excludes any other adjacent material, like non-English localizations of manga, Korean manhwa and webtoons, Chinese manhua, original English-language manga, western graphic novels, western comic books, and comic strips, except those which have been incidentially included in Madokami. This is also to prevent scope creep from spiraling out of control, as there are over 200 TiB of comics in existence.

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 MangaUpdates, there were 9,172 brand new manga series debuting in just 2025 alone! You would have to read 25 series a day to keep up with the sheer pace of new material. In that sense, English Manga Vault limiting itself to licensed English manga is a matter of practicality more than anything.

Limiting myself to licensed English manga provides a baseline of quality within English Manga Vault, as the highest-quality manga tend to get localized, 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.

And even accounting for the reduced scope, at its fullest extent, English Manga Vault will still be absolutely massive. At its fullest extent, EMV will comprise approximately 25 TiB of storage space if someone were to collect and build a fullset. Please keep in mind that English Manga Vault does not provide illegal download links, only lists of filenames and hashes.