Japanese comics

Manga (Japanese: 漫画 ) 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 prehistory in earlier Japanese art. The term ''manga'' 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 the country.

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 (''hentai'' and ''ecchi''), 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 (equivalent to 15issues per person). In 2020 Japan's manga market value hit a new record of ¥612.6 billion due to the fast growth of digital manga sales as well as increase of print sales. Manga have also gained a significant worldwide audience., Beginning with the late 2010s manga started massively outselling American comics. In 2020 the North American manga market was valued at almost $250 million. According to NPD BookScan manga made up 76% of overall comics and graphic novel sales in the US in 2021. The fast growth of the North American manga market has been attributed to manga's wide availability on digital reading apps, book retailer chains such as Barnes & Noble and online retailers such as Amazon as well as the increased streaming of anime. According to Jean-Marie Bouissou, manga represented 38% of the French comics market in 2005. This is equivalent to approximately 3 times that of the United States and was valued at about ($million). 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 (as coloring could lessen the impact of the artwork) and to keep printing costs low—although some full-color manga exist (e.g., ''Colorful''). 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. Collected chapters are usually republished in ''tankōbon'' volumes, frequently but not exclusively paperback books., A manga artist (''mangaka'' in Japanese) 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 ("manhua"), Korean ("manhwa"), English ("OEL manga"), and French ("manfra"), as well as in the nation of Algeria ("DZ-manga").

Etymology

The word "manga" comes from the Japanese word 漫画 (katakana: ; hiragana: ), composed of the two kanji 漫 (man) meaning "whimsical or impromptu" and 画 (ga) 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'' (1798), and in the early 19th century with such works as Aikawa Minwa's ''Manga hyakujo'' (1814) and the celebrated ''Hokusai Manga'' books (1814–1834) containing assorted drawings from the sketchbooks of the famous ukiyo-e artist Hokusai. Rakuten Kitazawa (1876–1955) first used the word "manga" in the modern sense.

In Japanese, "manga" 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

According to art resource Widewalls manga originated from ''emakimono'' (scrolls), ''Chōjū-jinbutsu-giga'', dating back to the 12th century. During the Edo period (1603–1867), 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'' (1798), and in the early 19th century with such works as Aikawa Minwa's ''Manga hyakujo'' (1814) and the ''Hokusai Manga'' books (1814–1834). Adam L. Kern has suggested that '' kibyoshi'', 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 and Western comic art probably originated in 17th 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 (1945–1952), and stresses U.S. cultural influences, including U.S. comics (brought to Japan by the GIs) and images and themes from U.S. television, film, and cartoons (especially Disney).

Regardless of its source, an explosion of artistic creativity occurred in the post-war period, involving manga artists such as Osamu Tezuka (''Astro Boy'') and Machiko Hasegawa (''Sazae-san''). ''Astro Boy'' quickly became (and remains) 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 on women's experience also came to characterize later ''shōjo manga''. Between 1950 and 1969, an increasingly large readership for manga emerged in Japan with the solidification of its two main marketing genres, ''shōnen manga'' aimed at boys and ''shōjo manga'' aimed at girls.

In 1969 a group of female manga artists (later called the ''Year 24 Group'', also known as ''Magnificent 24s'') made their ''shōjo'' manga debut ("year 24" comes from the Japanese name for the year 1949, the birth-year of many of these artists). The group included Moto Hagio, Riyoko Ikeda, Yumiko Ōshima, Keiko Takemiya, and Ryoko Yamagishi. Thereafter, primarily female manga artists would draw ''shōjo'' for a readership of girls and young women. In the following decades (1975–present), ''shōjo'' manga continued to develop stylistically while simultaneously evolving different but overlapping subgenres. Major subgenres include romance, superheroines, and "Ladies Comics" (in Japanese, ''redisu'' , ''redikomi'' , and ''josei'' ).

Modern ''shōjo'' 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 (or ''sentais'') 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 (''shōnen'' manga) and young men 18 to 30 years old (''seinen'' manga); 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 "seinen"— for "youth, young man" and for "adult, majority"—the second referring to pornographic manga aimed at grown men and also called ''seijin'' ("adult" ) manga. ''Shōnen'', ''seinen'', and ''seijin'' 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, ''shōnen'' 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 (''bishōjo'') 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 (''sentō bishōjo'')

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 ''gekiga'' 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. ''Gekiga'' such as Sampei Shirato's 1959–1962 ''Chronicles of a Ninja's Military Accomplishments'' (''Ninja Bugeichō'') 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.

Publications and exhibition

In Japan, manga constituted an annual 40.6 billion yen (approximately US$395 million) publication-industry by 2007. In 2006 sales of manga books made up for about 27% of total book-sales, and sale of manga magazines, for 20% of total magazine-sales.
The manga industry has expanded worldwide, where distribution companies license and reprint manga into their native languages.

Marketeers primarily classify manga by the age and gender of the target readership. In particular, books and magazines sold to boys (''shōnen'') and girls (''shōjo'') have distinctive cover-art, and most bookstores place them on different shelves. Due to cross-readership, consumer response is not limited by demographics. For example, male readers may subscribe to a series intended for female readers, and so on. Japan has manga cafés, or ''manga kissa'' (''kissa'' is an abbreviation of ''kissaten''). At a ''manga kissa'', people drink coffee, read manga and sometimes stay overnight.

The Kyoto International Manga Museum maintains a very large website listing manga published in Japanese.

Magazines

usually have many series running concurrently with approximately 20–40 pages allocated to each series per issue. Other magazines such as the anime fandom magazine ''Newtype'' featured single chapters within their monthly periodicals. Other magazines like ''Nakayoshi'' feature many stories written by many different artists; these magazines, or "anthology magazines", as they are also known (colloquially "phone books"), are usually printed on low-quality newsprint and can be anywhere from 200 to more than 850 pages thick. Manga magazines also contain one-shot comics and various four-panel ''yonkoma'' (equivalent to comic strips). Manga series can run for many years if they are successful. Popular shonen magazines include ''Weekly Shōnen Jump'', ''Weekly Shōnen Magazine'' and ''Weekly Shōnen Sunday'' - Popular shoujo manga include ''Ciao'', ''Nakayoshi'' and ''Ribon''. Manga artists sometimes start out with a few "one-shot" manga projects just to try to get their name out. If these are successful and receive good reviews, they are continued. Magazines often have a short life.

Collected volumes

After a series has run for a while, publishers often collect the chapters and print them in dedicated book-sized volumes, called ''tankōbon''. These can be hardcover, or more usually softcover books, and are the equivalent of U.S. trade paperbacks or graphic novels. These volumes often use higher-quality paper, and are useful to those who want to "catch up" with a series so they can follow it in the magazines or if they find the cost of the weeklies or monthlies to be prohibitive. "Deluxe" versions have also been printed as readers have gotten older and the need for something special grew. Old manga have also been reprinted using somewhat lesser quality paper and sold for 100 yen (about $1 U.S. dollar) each to compete with the used book market.

History

Kanagaki Robun and Kawanabe Kyōsai created the first manga magazine in 1874: ''Eshinbun Nipponchi''. The magazine was heavily influenced by ''Japan Punch'', founded in 1862 by Charles Wirgman, a British cartoonist. ''Eshinbun Nipponchi'' had a very simple style of drawings and did not become popular with many people. ''Eshinbun Nipponchi'' ended after three issues. The magazine ''Kisho Shimbun'' in 1875 was inspired by ''Eshinbun Nipponchi'', which was followed by ''Marumaru Chinbun'' in 1877, and then ''Garakuta Chinpo'' in 1879. ''Shōnen Sekai'' was the first ''shōnen'' magazine created in 1895 by Iwaya Sazanami, a famous writer of Japanese children's literature back then. ''Shōnen Sekai'' had a strong focus on the First Sino-Japanese War.

In 1905 the manga-magazine publishing boom started with the Russo-Japanese War, Poten '' Tokyo Pakku'' was created and became a huge hit. Shonen Pakku After ''Tokyo Pakku'' in 1905, a female version of ''Shōnen Sekai'' was created and named ''Shōjo Sekai

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