Manga
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Overview
The word "Manga" (漫画) is coined for the first time by Hokusai, a famous woodblock painter around 1840. He used the Chinese characters 漫 and 画 to make "irrelevant picture" to describe the comical doodles he did.
The word is used nowadays to describe the mountainous production of comic books produced in Japan. They say that there's more Manga in Japan than toilet paper. These manga are incredibly popular with everyone from prepubescent girls to salarymen, businessmen and beyond. This in contrast to the American comic book market, which is pretty much focused exclusively on the young male market and is seen as a pretty geeky thing to be interested in.
Brief History
The 18th Century
When the middle class of urban merchants was on the rise and a vibrant consumer culture emerged, you could say that the first manga appeared. These kibyoushi (草双紙) were printed using woodblock technology for adults, and covered the same subjects manga cover these days. Humor, drama, fantasy and even pornography. By the 19th century, these kibyoushi were replaced by a comicbook form similar to the American Punch, due to the aggressive import of Western culture into Japan.
The God of Manga
The late Tezuka Osamu has arguably singlehandedly been responsible for manga's current popularity that borders on the obscene. He is known in Japan as the God of Manga. In his autobiography he describes the difference between his manga and what went before as follows:
Until that time, most manga... were drawn from a two-dimensional perspective, and in the style of a stage play. The interactions of actors appearing from stage left and stage right were composed as if from the viewpoint of someone seated in the audience. I came to the realization that there was no way to produce power or psychological description using this approach, so I began to introduce cinematic techniques into my composition. The models for this were the German and French movies I saw in my days as a student. I manipulated close-ups and angles, of course, and tried using many panel or even many pages in order to capture faithfully movements and facial expressions that previously would have been taken care of with a single panel. So I would end up with long works five- or six-hundred to more than a thousand pages in length in no time at all.... Also, I 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.
His first full-length work after doing 4-panel cartoons for several years was called Shintakarajima or New Treasure Island in English. It was published in 1947, in the ultra-cheap akahon (赤本) format, named after the gaudy red ink used for the cover. This format was meant for children who could afford nothing else in the crushing poverty of postwar Japan. Tezuka changed the scene overnight, selling over 400,000 copies, an unprecedented success.
Weekly Shounen Magazine
In 1956, Japan's first weekly magazine appeared, Weekly Shounen Magazine, quickly followed by Weekly Shounen Sunday. This magazine is pretty much responsible for making Manga a mainstream product. Initially it was only filled for about one-third with manga content, but sales were mediocre. The publishers soon discovered however that sales increased as the number of pages of manga increased. The content of these shounen manga (shounen literally means boys) magazines was still dominated by Tezuka's style of "story" manga, but the readership of manga was growing older. Pretty soon darker, more gritty manga appeared such as Kamui-den (The Legend of Kamui) and Golgo 13. Various shounen magazines tried to incorporate these adult readers by incorporating darker themes in their stories.
But their overenthousiasm to win over the older reader caused the core fanbase of young boys to leave, and sales plummeted. Only one magazine prevailed, a smalltime magazine and latecomer, founded in 1968. Weekly Shounen Jump. This magazine, being small, was unable to draw the big name manga artists towards their magazine. However, this turned out to be in their advantage, because while the bigger magazines had to give their manga artists free reign, Jump was able to keep young, rookie artists under strict control, making sure they drew what the readers wanted. Among the series published in this magazine is Dragonball, Slam Dunk, and more recently Naruto and One Piece. In 1980, their reported circulation was a mindboggling three million, with the gap between Magazine and Sunday.
However, even though these two magazines may have lost the young reader, they have published some bestselling series and launched various famous people up to this day, including Fujisawa Toru (Shounen Jun'ai Gumi, Great Teacher Onizuka), Takahashi Rumiko (Ranma 1/2, Inu Yasha) and Masakazu Katsura (Video Girl Ai, DNA^2)
Girl Power
A genre that has no equivalent whatsoever in the West, where girls reading comics are a tiny minority, these stories are drawn mostly by women, for girls. Like the shounen, shoujo boomed in the 50s with the help of weekly magazines. And like shounen again, it was Tezuka Osamu who was responsible for the origin of this genre. 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 Ribbon 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 1950s and early 60s, the industry of shoujo manga was mostly taken care of by men who also drew shounen stories. However come the later half of the 60s, more and more women began drawing manga, with pioneer Satonaka Machiko publishing her first story in 1964 when she was only 16.
By the end of the 60s, the stream of female artists had turned into a flood, and shoujo manga was no longer a homogenous genre, with experiments being done with "male genres" like science-fiction, romance and even homosexual themes. A vaguely-defined elite group of female mangaka was identified as the Fabulous Forty-Niners, named after their common birthdate of 1949. Hagio Moto, of Jyuuichinin Iru (They Were Eleven, 1971), Takemiya Keikoof Terra E... (To earth..., 1980), and Ikeda Riyoko, of Versailles no Bara (The Rose of Versailles, 1974) are among the better known of them.
The 80s is something of a dark age for shoujo manga. It wasn't until the 90s that shoujo rejuvenated with the appearance of mahou shoujo or "magical girl" manga. CLAMP was pretty much singlehandedly responsible for the revival of shoujo, with Magic Knight Rayearth and Chobits among many other series.
