Manga

• 1. Introduction

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  Manga, the Japanese comics that now outsell American comics, were once the work of a four-page magazine that lasted only three issues. That magazine, Eshinbun Nipponchi, was created in 1874 by Kanagaki Robun and Kawanabe Kyosai. Its drawings were simple, it failed to find readers, and it folded almost immediately. From that false start grew a medium that, by 2024, was worth 704.3 billion yen inside Japan alone. How did a form rooted in 12th-century scrolls become one of Japan's biggest cultural exports? Who decided that comics should be read by people of all ages, and why are roughly half of Japan's manga artists women? The answers run through woodblock prints, a post-war explosion of creativity, and a digital shift that has quietly remade how the world reads.

• 2. Scrolls And Sketchbooks

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  Chōjū-jinbutsu-giga, the picture scrolls dating back to the 12th century, are where writers trace the origins of manga. During the Edo period, which ran from 1603 to 1867, a book of drawings titled Toba Ehon pushed the form further toward what would later carry the name. The word itself joins two kanji, one meaning whimsical or impromptu and the other meaning pictures. It came into common usage in 1798 with Santō Kyōden's picturebook Shiji no yukikai. Aikawa Minwa's Manga hyakujo followed in 1814, the same era that produced the Hokusai Manga books between 1814 and 1834, filled with assorted drawings from the sketchbooks of the ukiyo-e artist Hokusai. Adam L. Kern has suggested that kibyōshi, picture books from the late 18th century, may have been the world's first comic books. These graphic narratives shared humorous, satirical, and romantic themes with the comics that came later. Some were mass-produced as serials using woodblock printing. Yet Eastern comics are generally held apart from the Western tradition, whose art probably originated in 17th-century Italy. It was Rakuten Kitazawa, who lived from 1876 to 1955, who first used the word manga in its modern sense.

• 3. The Post-War Explosion

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  Osamu Tezuka created Astro Boy, and Machiko Hasegawa created Sazae-san, two names at the center of the creative burst that followed the Second World War. Writers describe two forces shaping modern manga. Frederik L. Schodt, Kinko Ito, and Adam L. Kern stress continuity with Japanese aesthetic traditions reaching back through Meiji and pre-Meiji culture. The other view emphasizes the Allied occupation of Japan, which lasted from 1945 to 1952, and the influence of U.S. comics brought over by the GIs, along with American television, film, and Disney. Tezuka's cinematographic technique treated panels like a motion picture, revealing action that bordered on slow motion alongside rapid zooms from distance to close-up. Later artists widely adopted that visual dynamism. Hasegawa's focus on daily life and women's experience came to define later shōjo manga. Her Sazae-san anime drew more viewers than any other anime on Japanese television in 2011. Between 1950 and 1969, the readership grew as two marketing genres hardened into place: shōnen for boys and shōjo for girls.

• 4. Drawn By Women

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  Machiko Satonaka has noted that manga has been largely unaffected by the gender disparities found in other fields. Women accounted for roughly half of all manga artists at least between 1975 and 2005. In 1969, a group of female artists later called the Year 24 Group made their shōjo debut, the name drawn from the Japanese year corresponding to 1949, the birth-year of many of them. The group included Moto Hagio, Riyoko Ikeda, Yumiko Ōshima, Keiko Takemiya, and Ryoko Yamagishi. From then on, primarily female artists drew shōjo for girls and young women. Modern shōjo romance sets love into emotionally intense narratives of self-realization. The superheroine strand produced 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 as both manga and anime. As of 2026, Machiko Hasegawa remains the only manga artist to have been awarded the People's Honour Award.

• 5. Magazines And Volumes

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  Manga stories are typically printed in black-and-white, partly because of time constraints and partly because color could lessen the impact of the artwork, and partly to keep printing costs low. In Japan, series are usually serialized in large magazines that run many stories at once, each presented as a single episode continued in the next issue. A single manga story is almost always longer than one issue of a Western comic, with roughly 20 to 40 pages allocated to each series per issue. Anthology magazines, colloquially called phone books, are printed on low-quality newsprint and can run from 200 to more than 850 pages thick. Popular shōnen titles include Weekly Shōnen Jump, Weekly Shōnen Magazine, and Weekly Shōnen Sunday, while shōjo readers turn to Ciao, Nakayoshi, and Ribon. Successful chapters are later collected into tankōbon volumes, the equivalent of U.S. trade paperbacks. Old manga have been reprinted on lesser paper and sold for 100 yen each, about one U.S. dollar, to compete with the used-book market. A manga artist, or mangaka, typically works with a few assistants in a small studio alongside a creative editor from a commercial publisher. By 2007, manga formed an annual 40.6 billion yen industry in Japan, making up about 27% of total book sales in 2006.

• 6. The Digital Turn

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  Pixiv has become the most visited site for artwork in Japan, a place where amateur and professional creators publish their pages. Almost all web manga keeps the conventional black-and-white format, even works that never see physical print. Twitter has also become a popular outlet, with artists releasing pages weekly in hopes of being picked up. One-Punch Man stands out as an amateur work released online that later received a professional remake, a digital release, and an anime adaptation soon after. Big print publishers have followed the readers online. Shogakukan runs Sunday Webry and Ura Sunday, both releasing weekly chapters and offering contests. Weekly Shōnen Jump released an app called Jump Paint, which guides users through storyboards and digital inking, offering more than 120 types of pen tips and more than 1,000 screentones. The Research Institute for Publications reported that digital manga book sales jumped 27.1 percent to 146 billion yen in 2016, while paper manga fell 7.4 percent to 194.7 billion yen. In 2020, total manga sales topped 600 billion yen for the first time, beating the 1995 peak. By 2024, of the 704.3 billion yen domestic market, the digital segment alone accounted for 512.2 billion yen.

• 7. Crossing Borders

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  Barefoot Gen, Keiji Nakazawa's autobiographical story of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, was among the first manga translated into English and marketed in the U.S., issued by Leonard Rifas and Educomics between 1980 and 1982. More followed, including Golgo 13 in 1986 and Lone Wolf and Cub in 1987. Matters shifted when translator Toren Smith founded Studio Proteus in 1986, acting as agent and translator for titles like Masamune Shirow's Appleseed and Kōsuke Fujishima's Oh My Goddess!. Sailor Moon proved an enormous success; by 1995 to 1998 the manga had been exported to over 23 countries, including China, Brazil, Mexico, and Australia. The Pokémon manga Electric Tale of Pikachu issue number one sold over 1 million copies, the best-selling single comic book in the United States since 1993. By 2008, the U.S. and Canadian market generated 175 million dollars in annual sales. According to NPD BookScan, manga made up 76% of overall comics and graphic novel sales in the U.S. in 2021. In France, 55% of comics sold in 2021 were manga, making it the biggest manga importer. As of 2021, the top four comics publishers in the world are the manga houses Shueisha, Kodansha, Kadokawa, and Shogakukan.

• 8. Schools And Skeptics

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  Kyoto Seika University has offered a highly competitive course in manga since 2000, and other universities later built training curricula of their own. Not everyone is convinced of their worth. Shuho Sato, who wrote Umizaru and Say Hello to Black Jack, argued on Twitter that manga school is meaningless because the schools have very low success rates. He claimed he could teach novices the required skills on the job in three months, while school students spend several million yen and four years and emerge good for nothing. Sato cited Keiko Takemiya, then a professor at Seika, who told a Government Council that a complete novice would be able to understand where Tachikiri, the margin section, is during four years. Sato countered that he would imagine it takes about thirty minutes to understand that at work. The disagreement sits oddly beside the Japan Business Federation's April 2023 proposal to quadruple sales of Japanese content overseas within ten years, a plan that will need far more than thirty-minute lessons to fill.