Manga
Manga are comics or graphic novels originating from Japan. Most manga conform to a style developed in Japan in the late 19th century, and the form has a long history in earlier Japanese art. The term is used in Japan to refer to both comics and cartooning. Outside of Japan, the word is typically used to refer to comics originally published in Japan.
In Japan, people of all ages and walks of life read manga. The medium includes works in a broad range of genres: action, adventure, business and commerce, comedy, detective, drama, historical, horror, mystery, romance, science fiction and fantasy, erotica, sports and games, and suspense, among others. Many manga are translated into other languages.
Since the 1950s, manga has become an increasingly major part of the Japanese publishing industry. By 1995, the manga market in Japan was valued at , with annual sales of 1.9billion manga books and manga magazines in Japan. The domestic manga market in Japan remained in the ¥400 billion range annually from 2014 to 2019. In 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic led to increased time spent at home, the market rapidly expanded to ¥612.6 billion. Growth continued even after the end of lockdowns, reaching a record high of ¥704.3 billion in 2024. Alongside this rapid expansion, the print manga market has continued to shrink; as of 2024, digital manga accounts for approximately ¥500 billion, while print manga makes up about ¥200 billion. Manga have also gained a significant worldwide readership. Beginning with the late 2010s manga started massively outselling American comics.
As of 2021, the top four comics publishers in the world are manga publishers Shueisha, Kodansha, Kadokawa, and Shogakukan. In 2020 the North American manga market was valued at almost $250 million. According to NPD BookScan manga made up 76% of overall comics and graphic novel sales in the US in 2021. The fast growth of the North American manga market is attributed to manga's wide availability on digital reading apps, book retailer chains such as Barnes & Noble and online retailers such as Amazon as well as the increased streaming of anime. Manga represented 38% of the French comics market in 2005. This is equivalent to approximately three times that of the United States and was valued at about . In Europe and the Middle East, the market was valued at $250 million in 2012.
Manga stories are typically printed in black-and-white—due to time constraints, artistic reasons and to keep printing costs low—although some full-color manga exist. In Japan, manga are usually serialized in large manga magazines, often containing many stories, each presented in a single episode to be continued in the next issue. A single manga story is almost always longer than a single issue from a Western comic. Collected chapters are usually republished in volumes, frequently but not exclusively paperback books. A manga artist typically works with a few assistants in a small studio and is associated with a creative editor from a commercial publishing company. If a manga series is popular enough, it may be animated after or during its run. Sometimes, manga are based on previous live-action or animated films.
Manga-influenced comics, among original works, exist in other parts of the world, particularly in those places that speak Chinese, Korean, English, and French, as well as in the nation of Algeria.
Etymology
The word "manga" comes from the Japanese word 漫画, composed of the two kanji meaning 'whimsical or impromptu' and meaning 'pictures'. The same term is the root of the Korean word for comics, manhwa, and the Chinese word manhua.The word first came into common usage in the late 18th century with the publication of such works as Santō Kyōden's picturebook Shiji no yukikai, and in the early 19th century with such works as Aikawa Minwa's Manga hyakujo and the celebrated Hokusai Manga books containing assorted drawings from the sketchbooks of the famous ukiyo-e artist Hokusai. Rakuten Kitazawa first used the word "manga" in the modern sense.
In Japanese, "" refers to all kinds of cartooning, comics, and animation. Among English speakers, "manga" has the stricter meaning of "Japanese comics", in parallel to the usage of "anime" in and outside Japan. The term "ani-manga" is used to describe comics produced from animation cels.
History and characteristics
Manga originated from , Chōjū-jinbutsu-giga, dating back to the 12th century. During the Edo period, a book of drawings titled Toba Ehon further developed what would later be called manga. The word itself first came into common usage in 1798, with the publication of works such as Santō Kyōden's picturebook Shiji no yukikai, and in the early 19th century with such works as Aikawa Minwa's Manga hyakujo and the Hokusai Manga books. Adam L. Kern has suggested that, picture books from the late 18th century, may have been the world's first comic books. These graphical narratives share with modern manga humorous, satirical, and romantic themes. Some works were mass-produced as serials using woodblock printing. However, Eastern comics are generally held separate from the evolution of Western comics; Western comic art probably originated in 17th century Italy.Writers on manga history have described two broad and complementary processes shaping modern manga. One view represented by other writers such as Frederik L. Schodt, Kinko Ito, and Adam L. Kern, stress continuity of Japanese cultural and aesthetic traditions, including pre-war, Meiji, and pre-Meiji culture and art. The other view, emphasizes events occurring during and after the Allied occupation of Japan, and stresses U.S. cultural influences, including U.S. comics and images and themes from U.S. television, film, and cartoons.
Regardless of its source, an explosion of artistic creativity occurred in the post-war period, involving manga artists such as Osamu Tezuka and Machiko Hasegawa. Astro Boy quickly became immensely popular in Japan and elsewhere, and the anime adaptation of Sazae-san drew more viewers than any other anime on Japanese television in 2011. Tezuka and Hasegawa both made stylistic innovations. In Tezuka's "cinematographic" technique, the panels are like a motion picture that reveals details of action bordering on slow motion as well as rapid zooms from distance to close-up shots. This kind of visual dynamism was widely adopted by later manga artists. Hasegawa's focus on daily life and women's experience also came to characterize later manga. Between 1950 and 1969, an increasingly large readership for manga emerged in Japan with the solidification of its two main marketing genres, manga aimed at boys and manga aimed at girls.
In 1969, a group of female manga artists made their manga debut. The group included Moto Hagio, Riyoko Ikeda, Yumiko Ōshima, Keiko Takemiya, and Ryoko Yamagishi. Thereafter, primarily female manga artists would draw for a readership of girls and young women. In the following decades, manga continued to develop stylistically while simultaneously evolving different but overlapping subgenres. Major subgenres include romance, superheroines, and "Ladies Comics".
Modern manga romance features love as a major theme set into emotionally intense narratives of self-realization. With the superheroines, shōjo manga saw releases such as Pink Hanamori's Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch, Reiko Yoshida's Tokyo Mew Mew, and Naoko Takeuchi's Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon, which became internationally popular in both manga and anime formats. Groups of girls working together have also been popular within this genre. Like Lucia, Hanon, and Rina singing together, and Sailor Moon, Sailor Mercury, Sailor Mars, Sailor Jupiter, and Sailor Venus working together.
Manga for male readers sub-divides according to the age of its intended readership: boys up to 18 years old and young men 18 to 30 years old ; as well as by content, including action-adventure often involving male heroes, slapstick humor, themes of honor, and sometimes explicit sex. The Japanese use different kanji for two closely allied meanings of ""—青年 for "youth, young man" and 成年 for "adult, majority"—the second referring to pornographic manga aimed at grown men and also called manga.,, and manga share a number of features in common.
Boys and young men became some of the earliest readers of manga after World War II. From the 1950s on, manga focused on topics thought to interest the archetypal boy, including subjects like robots, space-travel, and heroic action-adventure. Popular themes include science fiction, technology, sports, and supernatural settings. Manga with solitary costumed superheroes like Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man generally did not become as popular.
The role of girls and women in manga produced for male readers has evolved considerably over time to include those featuring single pretty girls such as Belldandy from Oh My Goddess!, stories where such girls and women surround the hero, as in Negima and Hanaukyo Maid Team, or groups of heavily armed female warriors
By the turn of the 21st century, manga "achieved worldwide popularity".
With the relaxation of censorship in Japan in the 1990s, an assortment of explicit sexual material appeared in manga intended for male readers, and correspondingly continued into the English translations. In 2010, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government considered a bill to restrict minors' access to such content.
The style of storytelling—thematically somber, adult-oriented, and sometimes deeply violent—focuses on the day-in, day-out grim realities of life, often drawn in a gritty and unvarnished fashion. such as Sampei Shirato's 1959–1962 Chronicles of a Ninja's Military Accomplishments arose in the late 1950s and 1960s, partly from left-wing student and working-class political activism, and partly from the aesthetic dissatisfaction of young manga artists like Yoshihiro Tatsumi with existing manga.