Manga

This article is about the comics created in Japan. For other uses, see Manga (disambiguation).

Wikipe-tan, a manga-like character used to personify Wikipedia.

Manga (漫画) is the Japanese word for comics (sometimes called komikku コミック) and print cartoons. In their modern form, manga date from shortly after World War II but have a long, complex history in earlier Japanese art.

In Japan, manga are widely read by people of all ages, so that a broad range of subjects and topics occur in manga, including action-adventure, romance, sports and games, historical drama, comedy, science fiction and fantasy, mystery, horror, sexuality, and business and commerce, among others. Since the 1950s, manga have steadily become a major part of the Japanese publishing industry, representing a 481 billion yen market in Japan in 2006 (approximately $4.4 billion dollars). Manga have also become increasingly popular worldwide. In 2006, the United States manga market was $175–200 million.

Manga are typically printed in black-and-white, although some full-color manga exist (e.g. Colorful). In Japan, manga are usually serialized in telephone book-size manga magazines, often containing many stories each presented in a single episode to be continued in the next issue. If the series is successful, collected chapters may be republished in paperback books called tankōbon. 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 even during its run. Although sometimes manga are drawn centering on previously existing live-action or animated films. (e.g. Star Wars).

Manga as a term outside of Japan refers specifically to comics originally published in Japan. However, manga and manga-influenced comics, among original works, exist in other parts of the world, particularly in Korea ("manhwa") and in the People's Republic of China, including Hong Kong ("manhua"). In France, "la nouvelle manga" is a form of bande dessinée drawn in styles influenced by Japanese manga. In the U.S., manga-like comics are called Amerimanga, world manga, or original English-language manga (OEL manga).

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

Etymology

The kanji for "manga" from Seasonal Passersby (Shiki no Yukikai), 1798, by Santō Kyōden and Kitao Shigemasa.

Manga, literally translated, means "whimsical pictures". 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 containing assorted drawings from the sketchbook of the famous ukiyo-e artist Hokusai. The first user of the word "manga" as its modern usage is Rakuten Kitazawa.

History and characteristics

Main article: History of manga

Overview of ideas

Japanese wood block illustration from 19th century

Historians and writers on manga history have described two broad and complementary processes shaping modern manga. Their views differ in the relative importance they attribute to the role of cultural and historical events following World War II versus the role of pre-War, Meiji, and pre-Meiji Japanese culture and art.

The first view emphasizes events occurring during and after the U.S. Occupation of Japan (1945-1952), and stresses that manga was strongly shaped by United States cultural influences, including U.S. comics brought to Japan by the GIs and by images and themes from U.S. television, film, and cartoons (especially Disney). Kinsella also sees a central role for how the booming post-war Japanese publishing industry helped create a consumer-oriented society in which publishing giants like Kodansha could shape popular taste.

Japanese writers like Takashi Murakami have also stressed events after WWII, but Murakami sees Japan's staggering defeat and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as having created long-lasting scars on the Japanese artistic psyche, which, in this view, lost its previously virile confidence in itself and sought solace in harmless and cute ("kawaii") images. However, Takayumi Tatsumi sees a special role for a transpacific economic and cultural transnationalism that created a postmodern and shared international youth culture of cartooning, film, television, music, and related popular arts, which was, for Tatsumi the crucible in which modern manga have developed.

For Murakami and Tatsumi, transnationalism (or globalization) refers specifically to the flow of cultural and subcultural material from one nation to another. In their usage, the term does not refer to international corporate expansion, nor to international tourism, nor to cross-border international personal friendships, but to ways in which artistic, aesthetic, and intellectual traditions influence each other across national boundaries. An example of cultural transnationalism is the creation of Star Wars films in the United States, their transformation into manga by Japanese artists, and the marketing of Star Wars manga to the United States. Another example is the transfer of hip-hop culture from the United States to Japan. Wong also sees a major role for transnationalism in the recent history of manga.

However, other writers stress continuity of Japanese cultural and aesthetic traditions as central to the history of manga. They include Frederik L. Schodt, Kinko Ito, and Adam L. Kern. Schodt points to the existence in the 1200s of illustrated picture scrolls like the Tobae scrolls that told stories in sequential images with humor and wit. Schodt also stresses continuities of aesthetic style and vision between ukiyo-e and shunga woodblock prints and modern manga (all three fulfill Eisner's criteria for sequential art). Schodt also sees a particularly significant role for kamishibai, a form of street theater where itinerant artists displayed pictures in a light box while narrating the story to audiences in the street. Torrance has pointed to similarities between modern manga and the Osaka popular novel between the 1890s and 1940, and argues that the development of widespread literacy in Meiji and post-Meiji Japan helped create audiences for stories told in words and pictures. Kinko Ito also roots manga historically in aesthetic continuity with pre-Meiji art, but she sees its post-World War II history as driven in part by consumer enthusiasm for the rich imagery and narrative of the newly developing manga tradition. Ito describes how this tradition has steadily produced new genres and markets, e.g., for girls' (shōjo) manga in the late 1960s and for Ladies Comics (redisu) in the 1980s.

Kern has suggested that kibyoshi, illustrated picture books from the late 1700s, may have been the world's first comic books. These graphical narratives share with modern manga humorous, satirical, and romantic themes. Although Kern does not believe that kibyoshi were a direct forerunner of manga, nonetheless, for Kern the existence of kibyoshi points to a Japanese willingness to mix words and pictures in a popular story-telling medium. The first recorded use of the term "manga" to mean "whimsical or impromptu pictures" comes from this tradition in 1798, which, Kern points out, predates Katsushika Hokusai's better known later usage by several decades.

Similarly, Inoue sees manga as being a mixture of image- and word-centered elements, each pre-dating the U.S.A. occupation of Japan. In his view, Japanese image-centered or "pictocentric" art ultimately derives from Japan's long history of engagement with Chinese graphic art, whereas word-centered or "logocentric" art, like the novel, was stimulated by social and economic needs of Meiji and pre-War Japanese nationalism for a populace unified by a common written language. Both fuse in what Inoue sees as a symbiosis in manga.

Thus, these scholars see the history of manga as involving historical continuities and discontinuities between the aesthetic and cultural past as it interacts with post-World War II innovation and transnationalism.

After World War II

Modern manga originates in the Occupation (1945-1952) and post-Occupation years (1952-early 1960s), when a previously militaristic and ultranationalist Japan was rebuilding its political and economic infrastructure. Although U.S. Occupation censorship policies specifically prohibited art and writing that glorified war and Japanese militarism, those policies did not prevent the publication of other kinds of material, including manga. Furthermore, the 1947 Japanese Constitution (Article 21) prohibited all forms of censorship. One result was an explosion of artistic creativity in this period.

File:Tezuka cinematographic.jpg

Tezuka's "cinematographic" technique as seen in Shin Takarajima (New Treasure Island).

In the forefront of this period are two manga series and characters that influenced much of the future history of manga. These are Osamu Tezuka's Mighty Atom (Astro Boy in the United States; begun in 1951) and Machiko Hasegawa's Sazae-san (begun in 1946).

Astro Boy was both a superpowered robot and a naive little boy. Tezuka never explained why Astro Boy had such a highly developed social conscience nor what kind of robot programming could make him so deeply affiliative. Both seem innate to Astro Boy, and represent a Japanese sociality and community-oriented masculinity differing very much from the Emperor-worship and militaristic obedience enforced during the previous period of Japanese imperialism. Astro Boy quickly became (and remains) immensely popular in Japan and elsewhere as an icon and hero of a new world of peace and the renunciation of war, as also seen in Article 9 of the Japanese constitution. Similar themes occur in Tezuka's New World and Metropolis.

By contrast, Sazae-san (meaning "Ms. Sazae") was drawn starting in 1946 by Machiko Hasegawa, a young woman artist who made her heroine a stand-in for millions of Japanese men and especially women rendered homeless by the war. Sazae-san does not face an easy or simple life, but, like Astro Boy, she too is highly affiliative and is deeply involved with her immediate and extended family. She is also a very strong character, in striking contrast to the officially sanctioned Neo-Confucianist principles of feminine meekness and obedience to the "good wife, wise mother" (ryōsai kenbo, りょうさいけんぼ; 良妻賢母) ideal taught by the previous military regime. Sazae-san faces the world with cheerful resilience, what Hayao Kawai calls a "woman of endurance." Sazae-san sold more than 62 million copies over the next half century.

A kami-shibai story teller from Sazae-san by Machiko Hasegawa. Sazae is the woman with her hair in a bun.

Tezuka and Hasegawa were also both stylistic innovators. 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 shojo manga.

Between 1950 and 1969, increasingly large audiences 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. Up to 1969, shōjo manga was drawn primarily by adult men for young female readers.

Two very popular and influential male-authored manga for girls from this period were Tezuka's 1953-1956 Ribon no Kishi (Princess Knight or Knight in Ribbons) and Matsuteru Yokoyama's 1966 Mahōtsukai Sarii (Little Witch Sally). Ribon no Kishi dealt with the adventures of Princess Sapphire of a fantasy kingdom who had been born with male and female souls, and whose sword-swinging battles and romances blurred the boundaries of otherwise rigid gender roles. Sarii, the pre-teen princess heroine of Mahōtsukai Sarii, came from her home in the magical lands to live on Earth, go to school, and perform a variety of magical good deeds for her friends and schoolmates. Yokoyama's Mahōtsukai Sarii was influenced by the U.S. TV sitcom Bewitched, but unlike Samantha, the main character of Bewitched, a married woman with her own daughter, Sarii is a pre-teenager who faces the problems of growing up and mastering the responsibilities of forthcoming adulthood. Mahōtsukai Sarii helped create the now very popular mahō shōjo or "magical girl" subgenre of later manga. Both series were and still are very popular.

Shōjo manga

In 1969, a group of women mangaka later called the Year 24 Group (also known as Magnificent 24s) made their shōjo manga debut (year 24 comes from the Japanese name for 1949, when many of these artists were born). The group included Hagio Moto, Riyoko Ikeda, Yumiko Oshima, Keiko Takemiya, and Riyoko Yamagishi and they marked the first major entry of women artists into manga. Thereafter, shōjo manga would be drawn primarily by women artists for an audience of girls and young women.

In 1971, Ikeda began her immensely popular shōjo manga Berusaiyu no Bara (The Rose of Versailles), a story of Oscar François de Jarjayes, a cross-dressing woman who was a Captain in Marie Antoinette's Palace Guards in pre-Revolutionary France. In the end, Oscar dies as a revolutionary leading a charge of her troops against the Bastille. Likewise, Hagio Moto's work challenged Neo-Confucianist limits on women's roles and activities as in her 1975 They Were Eleven, a shōjo science fiction story about a young woman cadet in a future space academy.

These women artists also created considerable stylistic innovations. In its focus on the heroine's inner experiences and feelings, shōjo manga are "picture poems" with delicate and complex designs that often eliminate panel borders completely to create prolonged, non-narrative extensions of time. All of these innovations – strong and independent female characters, intense emotionality, and complex design – remain characteristic of shōjo manga up to the present day.

Shōjo manga and Ladies' Comics from 1975 to today

In the following decades (1975-present), shōjo manga continued to develop stylistically while simultaneously evolving different but overlapping subgenres. Major subgenres have included romance, superheroines, and "Ladies Comics" ((in Japanese, redisu レディース, redikomi レヂィーコミ, and josei 女性 じょせい), whose boundaries are sometimes indistinguishable from each other and from shōnen manga.

In modern shōjo manga romance, love is a major theme set into emotionally intense narratives of self-realization. Japanese manga/anime critic Eri Izawa defines romance as symbolizing "the emotional, the grand, the epic; the taste of heroism, fantastic adventure, and the melancholy; passionate love, personal struggle, and eternal longing" set into imaginative, individualistic, and passionate narrative frameworks.

These romances are sometimes long narratives that can deal with distinguishing between false and true love, coping with sexual intercourse, and growing up in a complex world, themes inherited by subsequent animated versions of the story. These "coming of age" or bildungsroman themes occur in both shōjo and shōnen manga.

In the bildungsroman, the protagonist must deal with adversity and conflict, and examples in shōjo manga of romantic conflict are common. They include Miwa Ueda's Peach Girl, Fuyumi Soryo's Mars, and, for mature readers, Moyoco Anno's Happy Mania, Yayoi Ogawa's Tramps Like Us, and Ai Yazawa's Nana. In another shōjo manga bildungsroman narrative device, the young heroine is transported to an alien place or time where she meets strangers and must survive on her own (including Hagio Moto's They Were Eleven, Kyoko Hikawa's From Far Away, Yû Watase's Fushigi Yûgi: The Mysterious Play, and Chiho Saito's The World Exists For Me).

Yet another such device involves meeting unusual or strange people and beings, for example, Natsuki Takaya's Fruits Basket—one of the most popular shōjo manga in the United States—whose orphaned heroine Tohru must survive living in the woods in a house filled with people who can transform into the animals of the Chinese zodiac. In Harako Iida's Crescent Moon, heroine Mahiru meets a group of supernatural beings, finally to discover that she herself too has a supernatural ancestry when she and a young tengu demon fall in love.

With the superheroines, shōjo manga continued to break away from neo-Confucianist norms of female meekness and obedience. Naoko Takeuchi's Sailor Moon (Bishōjo Senshi Seiramun: "Pretty Girl Soldier Sailor Moon") is a sustained, 18-volume narrative about a group of young heroines simultaneously heroic and introspective, active and emotional, dutiful and ambitious. The combination proved extremely successful, and Sailor Moon became internationally popular in both manga and anime formats. Another example is CLAMP's Magic Knight Rayearth, whose three young heroines, Hikaru, Umi, and Fuu, are magically transported to the world of Cephiro to become armed magical warriors in the service of saving Cephiro from internal and external enemies.

The superheroine subgenre also extensively developed the notion of teams (sentai) of girls working together, like the Sailor Senshi in Sailor Moon, the Magic Knights in Magic Knight Rayearth, and the Mew Mew girls from Mia Ikumi's Tokyo Mew Mew. By today, the superheroine narrative template has been widely used and parodied within the shōjo manga tradition (e.g., Nao Yazawa's Wedding Peach and Hyper Rune by Tamayo Akiyama) and outside that tradition, e.g., in bishōjo comedies like Kanan's Galaxy Angel.

In the mid-1980s and thereafter, as girls who had read shōjo manga as teenagers matured and entered the job market, shōjo manga elaborated subgenres directed at women in their 20s and 30s. This "Ladies Comic" or redisu-josei subgenre has dealt with themes of young adulthood: jobs, the emotions and problems of sexual intercourse, and friendships or love among women.

Redisu manga retains many of the narrative stylistics of shōjo manga but has been drawn by and written for adult women. Redisu manga has been often, but not always, sexually explicit, but sexuality has characteristically been set into complex narratives of pleasure and erotic arousal combined with emotional risk. Examples include Ramiya Ryo's Luminous Girls, Masako Watanabe's Kinpeibai and the work of Shungicu Uchida Another subgenre of shōjo-redisu manga deals with emotional and sexual relationships among women (akogare and yuri), in work by Erica Sakurazawa, Ebine Yamaji, and Chiho Saito. Other subgenres of shōjo-redisu manga have also developed, e.g., fashion (oshare) manga, like Ai Yazawa's Paradise Kiss and horror-vampire-gothic manga, like Matsuri Hino's Vampire Knight, Kaori Yuki's Cain Saga, and Mitsukazu Mihara's DOLL, which interact with street fashions, costume play ("cosplay"), J-Pop music, and goth subcultures in complex ways.

By the start of the 21st century, manga for women and girls thus represented a broad spectrum of material for pre- and early teenagers to material for adult women.

Shōnen, seinen, and seijin manga

Manga for male readers can be characterized in different ways. One is by the age of its intended audience: boys up to 18 years old (shōnen manga) and young men 18- to 30-years old (seinen manga). Another approach is by content, including action-adventure often involving male heroes, slapstick humor, themes of honor, and sometimes explicit sexuality. Japanese uses different kanji for two closely allied meanings of "seinen"—青年 for "youth, young man" and 成年 for "adult, majority"—the second referring to sexually overt manga aimed at grown men and also called seijin ("adult," 成人) manga. Shōnen, seinen, and seijin manga share many features in common.

Boys and young men were among the earliest readers of manga after World War II. From the 1950s on, shōnen manga focused on topics thought to interest the archetypical boy: sci-tech subjects like robots and space travel, and heroic action-adventure. Shōnen and seinen manga narratives often portray challenges to the protagonist’s abilities, skills, and maturity, stressing self-perfection, austere self-discipline, sacrifice in the cause of duty, and honorable service to society, community, family, and friends.

Manga with solitary costumed superheroes like Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man did not become popular as a shōnen genre. An exception is Kia Asamiya's Batman: Child of Dreams, released in the U.S. by DC Comics and in Japan by Kodansha. However, lone heroes occur in Takao Saito's Golgo 13 and Koike and Kojima's Lone Wolf and Cub. Golgo 13 is about an assassin who puts his skills to the service of world peace and other social goals, and Ogami Itto, the swordsman-hero of Lone Wolf and Cub, is a widower caring for his son Daigoro while he seeks vengeance against his wife's murderers. However, Golgo and Itto remain men throughout and neither hero ever displays superpowers. Instead, these stories "journey into the hearts and minds of men" by remaining on the plane of human psychology and motivation.

Many shōnen manga have science fiction and technology themes. Early examples in the robot subgenre included Tezuka’s Astro Boy (see above) and Fujiko F. Fujio’s 1969 Doraemon, about a robot cat and the boy he lives with, which was aimed at younger boys. The robot theme evolved extensively, from Mitsuteru Yokoyama's 1956 Gigantor to later, more complex stories where the protagonist must not only defeat enemies, but learn to master himself and cooperate with the mecha he controls. Thus, in Neon Genesis Evangelion by Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, Shinji struggles against the enemy and against his father, and in Vision of Escaflowne by Katsu Aki, Van not only makes war against Dornkirk’s empire but must deal with his complex feelings for Hitomi, the heroine.

Sports themes are also popular in manga for male readers. These stories stress self-discipline, depicting not only the excitement of sports competition but also character traits the hero needs to transcend his limitations and to triumph, for example as a boxer (Tetsuya Chiba’s 1968-1973 Tomorrow’s Joe and Rumiko Takahashi's 1987 One-Pound Gospel) or a basketball player (Takehiko Inoue’s 1990 Slam Dunk).

Supernatural settings have been another source of action-adventure plots in shõnen and some shõjo manga in which the hero must master challenges. Sometimes the protagonist fails, as in Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata's Death Note, where protagonist Light Yagami receives a notebook from a Death God (shinigami) that kills anyone whose name is written in it, and, in a shōjo manga example, Hakase Mizuki's The Demon Ororon, whose protagonist abandons his demonic kingship of Hell to live and die on earth. Sometimes the protagonist himself is supernatural, like Kohta Hirano's Hellsing, whose vampire hero Alucard battles reborn Nazis hellbent on conquering England, but the hero may also be (or was) human, battling an ever-escalating series of supernatural enemies (Hiromu Arakawa's Full Metal Alchemist, Nobuyuki Anzai's Flame of Recca, and Tite Kubo's Bleach).

Military action-adventure stories set in the modern world, for example, about World War II, remained under suspicion of glorifying Japan’s Imperial history and have not become a significant part of the shōnen manga repertoire. Nonetheless, stories about fantasy or historical military adventure were not stigmatized, and manga about heroic warriors and martial artists have been extremely popular. Some are serious dramas, like Sanpei Shirato's The Legend of Kamui and Rurouni Kenshin by Nobuhiro Watsuki, but others contain strongly humorous elements, like Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball.

Although stories about modern war and its weapons do exist, they deal as much or more with the psychological and moral problems of war as they do with sheer shoot-'em-up adventure. Other battle and fight-oriented manga are complex stories of criminal and espionage conspiracies to be overcome by the protagonist, such as City Hunter by Hojo Tsukasa, Fist of the North Star by Tetsuo Hara, and in the shōjo manga From Eroica with Love by Aoike Yasuko, a long-running crime-espionage story combining adventure, action, and humor (and another example of how these themes occur across genres).

For manga critics Koji Aihara and Kentaro Takekuma, such battle stories endlessly repeat the same mindless themes of violence, which they sardonically label the "Shonen Manga Plot Shish Kebob", where fights follow fights like meat skewered on a stick. Other commentators suggest that fight sequences and violence in comics serve as a social outlet for otherwise dangerous impulses. Shōnen manga and its exteme warriorship have been parodied, for example, in Mine Yoshizaki's screwball comedy Sgt. Frog (Keroro Gunso), about a platoon of slacker alien frogs who invade the Earth and end up free-loading off the Hinata family in Tokyo.

Sex and women's roles

In early shōnen manga, men and boys played all the major roles, with women and girls having only auxiliary places as sisters, mothers, and occasionally girlfriends. Of the nine cyborgs in Shotaro Ishinomori's 1964 Cyborg 009, only one is female, and she soon vanishes from the action. Some recent shōnen manga virtually omit women, e.g., the martial arts story Baki the Grappler by Itagaki Keisuke and the supernatural fantasy Sand Land by Akira Toriyama. However, by the 1980s, girls and women began to play increasingly important roles in shōnen manga, for example, Toriyama's 1980 Dr. Slump, whose main character is the mischievous and powerful girl robot Arale Norimaki.

The role of girls and women in manga for male readers has evolved considerably since Arale. One class is the pretty girl (bishōjo). Sometimes the woman is unattainable, but she is always an object of the hero's emotional and sexual interest, like Belldandy from Oh My Goddess! by Kosuke Fujishima and Shao-lin from Guardian Angel Getten by Sakurano Minene. In other stories, the hero is surrounded by such girls and women, as in Negima by Ken Akamatsu and Hanaukyo Maid Team by Morishige. The male protagonist does not always succeed in forming a relationship with the woman, for example when Bright Honda and Aimi Komori fail to bond in Shadow Lady by Masakazu Katsura. In other cases, a successful couple's sexual activities are depicted or implied, like Outlanders by Johji Manabe. In still other cases, the initially naive and immature hero grows up to become a man by learning how to deal and live with women emotionally and sexually, like Yota in Video Girl Ai by Masakazu Katsura, Train Man in Train Man: Densha Otoko by Hidenori Hara, and Makoto in Futari Ecchi by Katsu Aki. In poruno- and eromanga (seijin manga), often called hentai manga in the U.S., a sexual relationship is taken for granted and depicted explicitly, as in work by Toshiki Yui and in Were-Slut by Jiro Chiba and Slut Girl by Isutoshi. The result is a range of depictions of boys and men from naive to very experienced sexually.

Heavily armed female warriors (sentō bishōjo) represent another class of girls and women in manga for male readers. Some sentō bishōjo are battle cyborgs, like Alita from Battle Angel Alita by Yukito Kishiro, Motoko Kusanagi from Masamune Shirow's Ghost in the Shell, and Chise from Shin Takahashi's Saikano. Others are human, like Attim M-Zak from Hiroyuki Utatane's Seraphic Feather, Johji Manabe's Karula Olzen from Drakuun, and Alita Forland (Falis) from Sekihiko Inui's Murder Princess.

With the relaxation of censorship in Japan after the early 1990s, a wide variety of explicitly drawn sexual themes appeared in manga intended for male readers that correspondingly occur in English translations. These depictions range from mild partial nudity through implied and explicit sexual intercourse through bondage and sadomasochism (SM), zoophilia (bestiality), incest, and rape. In some cases, rape and lust murder themes came to the forefront, as in Urotsukidoji by Toshio Maeda and Blue Catalyst from 1994 by Kei Taniguchi, but these extreme themes are not commonplace in either untranslated or translated manga.

Publications

The reading direction in a traditional manga.

In Japan, manga constitutes a 406.7 billion Yen (359 million USD) publication industry for 2007. On average many volumes of manga are printed annually. The manga industry expanded worldwide. Distribution companies license and reprint manga into their native languages.

When a series has been running for a while, the stories are usually collected together and printed in dedicated book-sized volumes, called tankōbon. These are the equivalent of U.S. trade paperbacks or graphic novels. These volumes 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. Recently, "deluxe" versions have also been printed as readers have got 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.

Manga are primarily classified by the age and gender of the target audience. In particular, books and magazines sold to boys (shōnen) and girls (shōjo) have distinctive cover art and are placed on different shelves in most bookstores. Due to cross-readership, consumer response is not limited by demographics. For example, male readers subscribing to a series intended for girls and so on.

Japan also has manga cafés, or manga kissa (kissa is an abbreviation of kissaten). At a manga kissa, people drink coffee and read manga, and sometimes stay there overnight.

Traditionally, manga are written from top to bottom and right to left, as this is the traditional reading pattern of the Japanese written language. Some publishers of translated manga keep this format, but other publishers flip the pages horizontally, changing the reading direction to left to right, so as not to confuse foreign audiences or traditional comics consumers. This practice is known as "flipping". For the most part, the criticisms suggest that flipping goes against the original intentions of the creator (for example, if a person wears a shirt that reads "MAY" on it, and gets flipped, then the word is altered to "YAM"). Flipping may also cause oddities with familiar asymmetrical objects or layouts, such as a car being depicted with gas pedal on the left and the brake on the right.

There has been an increase in the amount of publications of original webmanga. It is internationally drawn by enthusiasts of all levels of experience, and is intended for online viewing. It can be ordered in graphic novel form if available in print.

Magazines

Manga magazines usually have many series running concurrently with approximately 20–40 pages allocated to each series per issue. These manga 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 long. 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. 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.

Some relatively well-known publications are:

• Weekly Shonen Jump
• Big Comic Original
• Shonen Sunday
• Ribon
• Nakayoshi
• Young Animal
• Shojo Beat

Other magazines such as the anime magazine Newtype features single chapters within their monthly periodicals.

Dōjinshi

Some manga artists will produce extra, sometimes unrelated material, which are known as omake (literally, "bonus" or "extra"). They might also publish their unfinished drawings or sketches, known as oekaki (literally, "sketches"). Unofficial fan-made comics are also called dōjinshi. Some dōjinshi continue with a series' story or write an entirely new one using its characters, much like fan fiction. In 2007, doujinshi sold for 27.73 billion Yen (245 million USD).

Dōjinshi are produced by small amateur publishers outside of the mainstream commercial market in a similar fashion to small-press independently published comic books in the United States. Comiket, the largest comic book convention in the world with over 510,000 gathering in 3 days, is devoted to dōjinshi.

Gekiga

Gekiga literally means "drama pictures" and refers to a form of aesthetic realism in manga. Gekiga style drawing is emotionally dark, often starkly realistic, sometimes very violent, and focuses on the day-in, day-out grim realities of life, often drawn in gritty and unpretty fashions. Gekiga 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 Tatsumi Yoshihiro with existing manga. Examples include Sampei Shirato 's 1959-1962 Chronicles of a Ninja's Military Accomplishments (Ninja Bugeichō), the story of Kagemaru, the leader of a peasant rebellion in the 1500s, which dealt directly with oppression and class struggle, and Hiroshi Hirata's Satsuma Gishiden, about uprisings against the Tokugawa shogunate.

As the social protest of these early years waned, gekiga shifted in meaning towards socially conscious, mature drama and towards the avant-garde. Examples include Koike and Kojima's Lone Wolf and Cub and Akira, an apocalyptic tale of motorcycle gangs, street war, and inexplicable transformations of the children of a future Tokyo. Another example is Osamu Tezuka's 1976 manga MW, a bitter story of the aftermath of the storage and possibly deliberate release of poison gas by U.S. armed forces based in Okinawa years after World War II. Gekiga and the social consciousness it embodies remain alive in modern-day manga. An example is Ikebukuro West Gate Park from 2001 by Ira Ishida and Sena Aritou, a story of street thugs, rape, and vengeance set on the social margins of the wealthy Ikebukuro district of Tokyo.

International markets

The influence of manga on international cartooning has grown considerably in the last two decades. Influence refers to effects on comics markets outside of Japan and to aesthetic effects on comics artists internationally.

United States

Manga were introduced only gradually into U.S. markets, first in association with anime and then independently. Some U.S. fans were aware of manga in the 1970s and early 1980s. However, anime was initially more accessible than manga to U.S. fans, many of whom were college-age young people who found it easier to obtain, subtitle and exhibit video tapes of anime than translate, reproduce, and distribute tankobon-style manga books. One of the first manga translated into English and marketed in the U.S. was Keiji Nakazawa's Barefoot Gen, an autobiographical story of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima issued by Leonard Rifas and Educomics (1980-1983). More manga were translated between the mid-1980s and 1990s, including Golgo 13 in 1986, Lone Wolf and Cub from First Comics in 1987, and Kamui, Area 88, and Mai the Psychic Girl, also in 1987 and all from Viz-Eclipse Comics. Others soon followed, including Akira from Marvel Comics-Epic Comics and Appleseed from Eclipse Comics in 1988, and later Iczer-1 (Antarctic Press, 1994) and Ippongi Bang's F-111 Bandit (Antarctic Press, 1995).

In the 1980s to the mid-1990s, Japanese animation, like Akira, Dragon Ball, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Pokémon, dominated the fan experience and the market compared to manga. Matters changed when translator-entrpreneur Toren Smith founded Studio Proteus in 1986. Smith and Studio Proteus acted as an agent and translator of many Japanese manga, including Masamune Shirow's Appleseed and Kosuke Fujishima's Oh My Goddess, for Dark Horse and Eros Comix, eliminating the need for these publishers to seek their own contacts in Japan. Simultaneously, the Japanese publisher Shogakukan opened a U.S. market initiative with their U.S. subsidiary Viz, enabling Viz to draw directly on Shogakukan's catalogue and translation skills.

The U.S. manga market took an upturn with mid-1990s anime and manga versions of Masamune Shirow's Ghost in the Shell, translated by Frederik L. Schodt and Toren Smith and becoming very popular among fans. Another success of the mid-1990s was Sailor Moon. By 1995-1998, the Sailor Moon manga had been exported to over 23 countries, including China, Brazil, Mexico, Australia, most of Europe and North America. In 1998, Mixx Entertainment-TokyoPop issued U.S. manga book versions of Sailor Moon and CLAMP's Magic Knight Rayearth. In 1996, Mixx Entertainment founded TokyoPop to publish manga in trade paperbacks and, like Viz, began aggressive marketing of manga to both young male and young female demographics.

In the following years, manga became increasingly popular, and new publishers entered the field while the established publishers greatly expanded their catalogues. As of December 2007, at least 15 U.S. manga publishers have released some 1300-1400 titles. Simultaneously, mainstream U.S. media began to discuss manga, with articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and Wired Magazine. As of 2007, manga is a major component of the U.S. comics market.

Europe and the United Kingdom

The influence of manga on European cartooning is somewhat different than U.S. experience. Manga was opened to the European market during the 1970's when Italy and France broadcasted anime. French art has borrowed from Japan since the 19th century (Japonisme), and has its own highly developed tradition of bande dessinée cartooning. In France, imported manga has easily been assimilated into high art traditions. For example, Volumes 6 and 7 of Yu Aida's Gunslinger Girl center on a cyborg girl, a former ballet dancer named Petruchka. The Asuka edition of Volume 7 contains an essay about the ballet Petruchka by Russian composer Igor Stravinsky and first performed in Paris in 1911. However, Francophone readership of manga is not limited to an artistic elite. Instead, beginning in the mid-1990s, manga has proven very popular to a wide readership, accounting for about one-third of comics sales in France since 2004. According to the Japan External Trade Organization, sales of manga reached $212.6 million within France and Germany alone in 2006. European publishers marketing manga translated into French include Asuka, Casterman, Kana, and Pika, among others. European publishers also translate manga into German, Italian, Spanish, and Dutch, and other languages. Manga publishers based in the United Kingdom include Orionbooks/Gollancz and Titan Books. U.S. manga publishers have a strong marketing presence in the UK, e.g., the Tanoshimi line from Random House.

Localized manga

A number of U.S. artists have drawn comics and cartoons influenced by manga. An early example was Vernon Grant, who drew manga-influenced comics while living in Japan in the late 1960s-early 1970s. Others include Frank Miller's mid-1980s Ronin, William Warren and Toren Smith's 1988 The Dirty Pair, Ben Dunn's 1993 Ninja High School, Stan Sakai's 1984 Usagi Yojimbo, and Manga Shi 2000 from Crusade Comics (1997).

By the 21st Century, several U.S. manga publishers began to produce work by U.S. artists under the broad marketing label of manga. In 2002, I.C. Entertainment, formerly Studio Ironcat and now out of business, launched a series of manga by U.S. artists called Amerimanga. Seven Seas Entertainment followed suit with World Manga. Simultaneously, TokyoPop introduced original English-language manga (OEL manga) later renamed Global Manga. TokyoPop is currently the largest U.S. publisher of original English language manga.

Francophone artists have also developed their own versions of manga, like Frédéric Boilet's la nouvelle manga. Boilet has worked in France and in Japan, sometimes collaborating with Japanese artists. A Francophone Canadian example is the Montréal, Québec based artists' group MUSEBasement, which draws manga-style artwork.

International Manga Award

In May 2007, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced an international prize for manga of non-Japanese origin. The prize was awarded in late June 2007, with Hong Kong artist Lee Chi Ching winning first place. Runner ups were artists from Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Australia.

See also

• Anime
• Dōjinshi
• Hentai
• Japanese popular culture
• La nouvelle manga
• Lianhuanhua
• List of films based on manga
• List of licensed manga in English
• List of manga distributors
• List of manga magazines
• List of mangaka
• Mangaka
• Manga iconography
• Manga outside Japan
• Manhua (Chinese comics)
• Manhwa (Korean comics)
• Nerima, Tokyo
• Oekaki
• Omake
• Original English-language manga
• Otaku
• Scanlation (fan scanned and translated manga)