As quintessentially contemporary as manga may seem, the oldest extant manga-style drawings actually date from the eighth-century zare-ga (play pictures), scrawled graffiti-like in the attic of the Horyuji Temple in Nara.
After that, artists during the Heian Period (794-1185) began drawing caricatures of people and narrative picture scrolls like the satirical "Choju Jinbutsu Kigakan (Animal Scrolls)" attributed to Toba Sojo (Bishop Toba; 1053-1140), which show frogs and rabbits in situations deriding the Buddhist clergy. By the Kamakura Period (1192-1333), these graphics had evolved into illustrated scrolls of Buddhist teachings and grotesque scenes of suffering.
It was not till the early 18th century that artists like Ooka Shunboku (1680-1763) began to combine pictures and text to tell a story -- a style known as toba-e.