In 1968, the women's magazine Josei Seven published the first gekiga manga aimed at a female audience, marking a pivotal moment in the history of Japanese comics. This work, titled The Life of a Woman, was created by Miyako Maki, a shōjo manga artist who had debuted in the late 1950s and pivoted to gekiga as her original audience aged into adulthood. The emergence of this category was preceded by the rise of gekiga in the 1950s and 1960s, which sought to use manga to tell serious and grounded stories aimed at adult audiences. By the late 1960s, gekiga was a mainstream artistic movement, and in 1968, the women's magazine Josei Seven published the first gekiga manga aimed at a female audience: The Life of a Woman by Miyako Maki. Maki was a shōjo manga artist who debuted in the late 1950s and pivoted to gekiga as her original audience aged into adulthood. Two magazines dedicated to women's gekiga were founded shortly thereafter: Mushi Production in 1969, and Futabasha in 1972, though neither were commercially successful and both folded after several issues. Despite the commercial failure of women's gekiga, the 1970s nonetheless saw the significant development of shōjo manga through the efforts of artists in the Year 24 Group. The Year 24 Group contributed significantly to the development of shōjo manga by creating manga stories that were more psychologically complex, and which dealt directly with topics of politics and sexuality. Yukari Fujimoto, editor of Shōjo Comic, published multiple works by the Year 24 Group and became the founding editor of the magazine Petit Flower in 1980, which targeted an older teen readership and published adult-focused works by Year 24 Group members Moto Hagio and Keiko Takemiya. Consequently, the readership of shōjo manga widened from its historical audience of children to incorporate teenagers and young adult women. Publishers sought to exploit this new market of mature shōjo readers by creating dedicated magazines, which came to be described using the genre name
The Stigma of the 1980s
Open depictions of sexual acts came to be a defining trait of ladies' comics, in contrast to the editorial restrictions still placed on sexual depictions in shōjo manga. The manga artist Milk Morizono, renowned for herThe Rise of Young Ladies
Contemporaneously, new manga magazines aimed at adult women in their early twenties emerged: Young You in 1987, Young Rose in 1990, and Feel Young in 1991. Manga published in these magazines came to be referred to asThe 1990s Legitimacy Shift
Ladies' comic magazines responded to this new competition by focusing on manga addressing social issues. The strategy was successful, and by the late 1990s had gained greater legitimacy as a literary genre and attracted a more general audience, with multiple ladies' comics titles adapted as films and television series. The term josei manga also emerged during this period, used primarily by academics to distinguish manga aimed at adult women from shōjo manga. In 2010, You was the top-selling josei manga magazine, with a reported circulation of 162,917; by comparison, the top-selling shōjo magazine that year (Ciao) had a reported circulation of 745,455, while the top-selling seinen and shōnen magazines (Weekly Young Jump and Weekly Shōnen Jump) had reported circulations of 768,980 and 2.8 million, respectively. Anime has been a significant influencing factor in attracting a mainstream audience to josei manga since the 2000s, with the josei series Paradise Kiss (1999), Bunny Drop (2005), Chihayafuru (2007), Princess Jellyfish (2008), and Eden of the East (2009) all either originating as popular anime, or enjoying breakout success after being adapted into anime.