A millennium before Hokusai applied the term manga to a collection of his less serious works, there were "cartoonish" drawings to be found in Japan, but whether or not pictures drawn in such a style constitute manga is a tricky question.
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The first clear examples of such sequential art
are the picture scrolls of which combine pictures and text to tell
stories or describe events. These scrolls look and work like modern manga
or comics in many ways, but there is a crucial difference: whereas
modern-day manga are produced for mass consumption, picture scrolls were
singular works of art produced for an elite audience.
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| It was in late eighteenth-century Japan, when a
growing middle class of urban merchants had developed a vibrant consumer
culture, that a manga-like medium produced for popular consumption first
appeared.
Printed in book form using woodblock technology, kibyôshi ("yellow covers") were storybooks for adults in which narration and dialogue were placed in and around ink-brush illustrations, often in creative ways that consciously blurred the distinction between text and picture. Like modern-day manga, they dealt with a variety of subjects, including humor, drama, fantasy, and even pornography. By the mid nineteenth century, both kibyôshi and gôkan had disappeared because of government censorship and the convenience and speed of moveable-type technology. |
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The ancestor of the modern manga are the European/American-style political cartoon of the latter 19th Century, and the multi-panel comic strips that flowered in American newspapers in the last years of the 19th Century and the first years of the 20th Century.
For the first half of the twentieth century American comics were more popular and diverse than were Japanese manga.
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Perhaps the single most important factor in the creation of the modern manga industry was the work of one artist, the late Osamu Tezuka, known in Japan as the "god of manga." Tezuka's most popular creation, Mighty Atom, is known throughout the world; an animated version was broadcast in the U.S. in the 1960's under the name "Astro Boy." Until that time, most manga [...] were drawn from a two-dimensional perspective, and in the style of a stage play. He thought the potential of manga was more than getting a laugh; using themes of tears and sorrow, anger and hatred, I made stories that didn't always have happy endings. |  |
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Tezuka made his comic book debut in 1947 with a story entitled New Treasure Island, which was published as an akahon, or "red book.. At the time, akahon were a small niche industry providing children with one of the few entertainment media they could afford in the crushing poverty of early postwar Japan. New Treasure Island changed the scene overnight, selling an unprecedented 400,000 copies. |
Publishers saw opportunity in this genre, thus they had no trouble finding young artists eager to emulate Tezuka's revolutionary style. Tezuka moved to a rundown apartment building in Tokyo to be closer to the publishing industry, and quickly developed a following of budding manga artists, some of whom actually moved into the same apartment building. Most of these artists--Shohtaroh Ishimori (later Ishinomori), Fujiko Fujio, Fujio Akatsuka, Hideko Mizuno--went on to become giants of the postwar manga industry.
Tezuka's innovations led to a broadening of the manga market and had a consequence that would inevitably force a radical restructuring of the market: the children who were raised on the manga of Tezuka and his followers, unlike their predecessors, didn't stop reading manga when they got to middle school. Or high school. Or college.
There is a surprisingly clear line that separates the "pre-manga generation" from the "manga generation," and that line can drawn somewhere around 1950. Those born before 1950 considered manga "kids' stuff" and stopped reading manga by the time they entered middle school. Those born after 1950 have always taken manga for granted as just another medium that can be enjoyed by adults as well as children.
In 1956, Japan's first weekly magazine appeared, setting off a boom in weeklies that would encompass even the children's market before the decade was out.
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In 1959, and Weekly Shônen Sunday became the first children's weeklies, and others soon followed. Initially, these magazines were conceived of as general education and entertainment magazines, with manga usually occupying no more than forty percent of each issue. But circulations (hovering around 200,000) were low, as were those of the traditional monthly children's magazines. It didn't take long, however, for publishers to figure out that they could raise sales by increasing the the space dedicated to manga. |
Within a few years, manga came to occupy more than half of the total space, and at the same time, the magazines gradually phased out "educational" items, much to the horror and disgust of the educators and parents groups that had supported them early on. In Japan, however, there were to be no government hearings of the kind that intimidated and crippled the American comic book industry in the mid-1950s, and despite some blustering, sales continued to rise.
| From the late 1950s the shônen
("boys') magazine readership for manga was growing older and in need
of revision. Teenagers, young laborers and college students began to
turn to the then-popular "rental book shops," where a new genre
of sophisticated and serious manga (known as gekiga, meaning
"theatrical pictures") had been developing since the late 1950s.
These rental manga emphasized realism, in both drawing style and content,
and were often grim, pensive, or violent. What humor there was tended to
be black, and there was little of the slapstick and comic relief that
characterized "story manga," which always took primary school
boys as their lowest common denominator.
Among the more popular artists working in the rental manga market were Sanpei Shirato and Takao Saitoh, known to English readers for translations of The Legend of Kamui and Golgo 13, respectively. |
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In the latter 1960s, a new category of manga magazine, known as seinen ("youth") manga began to appear, such as Weekly Manga Action (1967, Futabasha Publishing) and Monthly Big Comic (1968, Shogakukan Publishing). While some rental manga artists moved to shônen ("boys") manga magazines, many more began working for the new seinen magazines, which quickly began to eat into shônen manga magazine circulations. The two leading shônen manga magazines, Shogakukan Publishing's Sunday and Kodansha Publishing's Magazine, began to lose the primary-school boys who had always been their core readership, and circulations plummeted.
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Shueisha Publishing's Weekly Shônen Jump, founded in 1968, remained faithful to it's pre-teen readers and quickly moved up from behind to take the lead in the early 1970's. Jump's greatest advantage was that it fielded a team of low-payed rookie artists to produce works that met readers' demands, which were ascertained through exhaustive reader surveys. Jump widened the gap between themselves and the nearest competitors, Magazine and Sunday, producing one blockbuster hit after another, such as the long-running Dragonball, by Akira Toriyama, and Slam Dunk, by Takehiko Inoue. |
In 1980, Jump's claimed circulation was three million; in 1985, four million; in 1988, five million. In 1994, the figure staggering 6,200,000. It was far and away the best-selling magazine of any kind in Japan. Weekly Shônen Magazine's claimed circulation in '94 was 3,750,000, while Weekly Shônen Sunday's was 1,270,000.
The genre of shôjo manga, or "girls' comics," has been met with surprise and puzzlement by those outside Japan. The reason being that manga/comics are usually associated with boys and not girls.. There is not even a rough equivalent outside of Japan of the shôjo manga genre. It is created primarily by women artists explicitly for audiences of girls and young women. Whereas female readers of comics in the English-speaking world are a minority within a minority, in Japan it is girls who don't read manga who comprise the minority.
| Shôjo manga
first took root in the decade following the end of the Pacific War, and,
as with shônen manga, it was Osamu Tezuka who can be credited with
planting the seed. Magazines geared at Japanese primary-school girls
had long carried simple, humor-oriented comic strips of the kind common in
American newspapers, but it was Tezuka, with a work titled Ribon no
kishi ("Knight of the Ribbon," 1954), who pioneered
longer, more technically and narratively sophisticated stories combining
drama, adventure, fantasy, tragedy, humor, and romance.
In the 1950's and early 1960's, the majority of shôjo manga were created by male artists, most of whom also worked in the shônen genre. The number of professional women artists working in shôjo manga prior to 1960 (most notably, Toshiko Ueda, Masako Watanabe, Hideko Mizuno, and Miyako Maki) could almost be counted on the fingers of one hand. In 1963, the revolutionary shift from a monthly to a weekly format that had begun in the shônen manga genre five years earlier began to sweep through the shôjo manga genre as well. There was a need for more artists, and by then it had become clear that women artists were more likely than men to be able to meet the demands of readers and help the publishers realize their goal of selling more magazines. Women artists, such as Yasuko Aoike, Minori Kimura and Waki Yamato, debuted one after the other. But the debut that attracted the most attention was that of Machiko Satonaka, whose first professional story appeared in Weekly Friend in 1964 when the artist was only sixteen years old. In retrospect, this event seems to have been a foreshadowing of the second revolution in the shôjo manga genre. |
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Ribon no kishi ("Knight of the Ribbon," 1954) |
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Between 1967 and 1969, the steady stream of new women artists turned to a flood, and attention soon focused on a vaguely defined group of young artists who came to be known as the "Fabulous Forty-Niners," because many of them were born in or around 1949. Artists such as Moto Hagio (creator of They Were Eleven and A, A'), Yumiko Oh-shima (creator of Banana Bread Pudding), Keiko Takemiya (creator of Toward the Terra), Riyoko Ikeda (creator of The Rose of Versailles), and Ryohko Yamagishi (creator of The Son of Heaven in the Land Where the Sun Rises) began to experiment with new themes, stories and styles, rejecting the limitations of traditional definitions of the shôjo manga genre and appealing to increasingly older readers. They played with notions of gender and sexuality, adapted such "boys' genres" as science fiction, and explored some of the weightiest issues of human existence. |
Interestingly, whereas the weekly format has become the foundation of the shônen manga magazine market, the same format, though it provided the occasion for both the increase of women artists and the radical expansion of the genre's boundaries and readership, did not last among shôjo manga magazines. The weekly format put pressure on artists to focus on action, and forced them to work at a pace that made it difficult for them to achieve the depth that many of them sought. The weekly format was gradually replaced with a biweekly format, and the weekly format has largely given way to the original monthly format. Now artists can draw longer installments at a less hectic pace, developing the subtleties of character relationships, mood, and setting that are shôjo manga's strongest features.
| By the end of the 1970s, shôjo manga diversed into a number of subgenres, such as fantasy and science fiction, or stories focusing on homosexual romance between boys (known as "boys' love," or sometimes "yaoi"), had become firmly established, distinct from the "mainstream" of (heterosexual) love-comedies that themselves had become more sophisticated and less governed by taboo. |  |
| As the upper age-limit of shôjo manga readerships continued to rise, the 1980s saw a trend towards increased specialization and more narrowly-targeted readerships, particularly with regard to age. Few girls above the sixth grade (except for diehard Sailor Moon or RayEarth fans) would be caught dead reading Nakayoshi, for example, while many others give up Ribbon by the end of middle school. Similarly, the content of Shôjo Comic in 2005 might make a more innocent reader blush, and while Hana to yume might stigmatize one as a sci-fi/fantasy otaku ("geek"), the popular Special Edition Margaret is dismissed by some as too middle-of-the-road. |  |
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Sailor Moon, 1992-1997 |
The first magazines to try to tap into the manga by women for women market appeared in the early 1980's and were narrowly geared at young "office ladies" (clerical workers) and housewives. The content was similar in many ways to American soap operas: lots of sleaze.
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By the late 1980s, it became apparent that this formula appealed only to a certain niche as publishers began to realize that many young adult women were buying not these new "ladies comics" but the same shôjo manga they enjoyed in high school. Having finally "got it," publishers in the 1990s began to create a variety of subgenres geared at a specific "types" of adult Japanese women. They range from more "artsy" publications, such as the progressive Feel Young, through the conservative top-seller YOU and the mainstream Chorus, to the unabashedly pornographic Comic Amour. At long last, there are manga catering to the tastes of practically every women and girl of the post-1950 "manga generation." |  |
Yet in many ways, the diverse works that appear in these narrowly-focused magazines continue to hold more in common with each other than any of them do with shônen or seinen manga. Even as tastes have diversified and the market has matured, there remains a certain esthetic common ground that Japanese women—as artists and as readers—have staked out for themselves. There are plenty of girls and women who read shônen or seinen manga, and there are more than a few boys and men (many of them "closeted") who read shôjo or "ladies'" manga. Yet the basic genre distinctions remain, and it seems unlikely that they will collapse any time in the near future.