History Of Manga

The first examples of what might be called "manga" were picture scrolls created during the 6th and 7th centuries by Buddhist monks. The scrolls ran continually, using common symbols such as cherry blossoms and red leaves to indicate the passage of time. The most famous of these works is Choujuugiga, meaning "animal scrolls", a work that depicted animals behaving like humans and satirized Buddhist priests.

Around the beginning of the 13th century pictures began to be drawn on temple walls, depicting images of the afterlife and of animals. These pictures were crude and deliberately exagerrated representations, and bear a remarkable similarity to modern manga. This phenomenon continued over hundreds of years, branching out to include numerous other subjects, although the style remained the same.

Around the start of the 1600s these pictures were made attractions in themselves for the first time, they were not drawn on temple walls but on wood blocks. These were known as Edo, and the subject was less religious, often graphically erotic, although they branched out once again to include various other subjects, particularly buildings and satire. At around this time the word manga was first used to describe the artistic style. The pictures were by now generally composed in monochrome, with simple outlines and rudimentary blocks of colour which forewent shading. The subject took precedence over the method of representing it.

In 1702 Shumboko Ono, an early celebrity manga artist, made a book out of prints of these pictures with captions, although it was a collection of pictures rather than a progressive story. This method developed over the next hundred years, in books which combined stories with ink-brush illustrations blurred distinctions between text and picture for every paragraph, allowing the art to be just as sequential as the narrative and the narrative to be more frenetic and pacy. The tradition of Toba-e, as these comics were called, grew over the next century, until they were the main form of literature for most of japanese society. The most popular ones were called ukiyo-e, portraits of the "floating world." These illustrations were generally salacious images of scenes from the red-light district, though they also depicted the age's pleasures, such as the latest outfits and the most popular places to visit. In the late 18th century, kibyoushi, or "yellow-covers," gained popularity.

In 1815, the term manga was created by the artist Hokusai, a prolific artist who lived from 1760-1849 and left over 30,000 works. He was the creator of the woodblock The Great Wave, his most famous picture and the one most closely identified with traditional Japanese art. His new term for some of his artwork was made of the words "man," meaning "in spite of oneself," "lax" or "whimsical," and "ga," meaning "picture."

When Japan was opened to the outside world, European artists introduced shading, perspective and anatomy. They also introduced word balloons and separate sequences. Also, new printing techniques were introduced at this time that were more efficent than woodblock prints. Under European influence, Japanese started making humor magazines similar to Punch, the most famous of which was Marumaru Chimbun in 1877.

At the end of 19th century, the first comic strips appeared in John Pulitzer's New York World. Comics of this type appeared in Japanese newspapers soon after and quickly became extremely popular, and Japanese comic artists flourished. But during the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Japanese government started intimidating artists and publishers. Many magazines either closed or started censoring themselves harshly; magazines who did neither frequently had their editors arrested. These types of arrests happened so often that magazines would sometimes pick an employee to be a "jail editor" who would have the honor of taking the punishment and saving his company.

World War II brought this sort of treatment to its logical conclusion. Some cartoonists already believed in what the government were doing; many were forced into tenkou, or a sort of forced conversion. Those who cooperated were greatly rewarded, and those who didn't cooperate were punished with detentions, ostracized and forbidden to write. Artists who had spent their entire careers criticizing the government suddenly changed their tune. During the war, cartoonists would produce three basic types of strips: single-panel strips about Japan's enemies, family comic strips that portrayed home life during a war, and propaganda.

After World War II, cartoons flourished. The publishers who had been powerful before the war were now in shambles, which allowed many tiny new companies to grow. These tiny companies published extremely cheap comics called "red books." One of the red book artists was a medical student named Tezuka Osamu.

One artist deserves credit for modern manga, the late Tezuka Osamu. Mighty Atom, his most popular creation, is famous around the world; a 1960s animated version was broadcast in the U.S. as Astro Boy. In his autobiography, Tezuka described how his manga differ from his predecessors':

Most manga were drawn from a two dimensional perspective like a stage play. Actors' entrances from stage left and right focused on the audience. I came to realize there was no way to produce power or psychological impact with this approach, so I began to introduce cinematic techniques from the German and French movies of my student days. I manipulated close-ups and angles and tried using many panels or many pages to faithfully capture movements and facial expressions that previously would have been a single panel. So I ended up with works more than 1,000 pages in length. The potential of manga was more than humor; using themes of tears, sorrow, anger and hatred, I made stories that did not always have happy endings.

After drawing four-panel comic strips for newspapers, Tezuka debuted in comic books in 1947 with New Treasure Island, a story published as an akahon ('red book'), cheap comics named for the gaudy red ink on the cover. Akahon were a small niche industry providing children with the little entertainment affordable in the crushing poverty of early postwar Japan. New Treasure Island changed manga overnight, selling an unprecedented 400,000 copies. Tezuka moved to a rundown apartment building in Tokyo to be near publishers, and quickly developed a following of budding manga artists, some of whom even moved into the same building. Tezuka's innovations led to a broadening, radical restructuring of the market: children, raised on the manga of Tezuka and his followers, unlike predecessors, didn't stop reading manga when they got to middle school. Or high school. Or college.

In 1956, Toei Animation was founded. Its president, Hiroshi Okawa, wanted to create a Japanese film studio comparable to Disney. Its first film, The Tale of the White Serpent, was released in 1958. It, and the next few films the studio released, paved the way for more mature animation. Shortly after, Tezuka Osamu founded his own animation company, focused on creating movies and series for TV. His Tetsuwan Atomu became the first real animated series for Japanese television.

What would those early Japanese artists think of today's manga industry? What would they think of the lavish movies and television series made out of them? Would they be dazzled by the giant robots, or confused by salaryman heroes? Perhaps, instead, they would feel completely at home among these "whimsical pictures."

Part 2: Boys' Manga

A surprisingly clear line separates the pre-manga from manga generation. Those born before 1950 stopped reading manga after starting junior high, but those born after 1950 have always seen man-ga as entertainment for adults and children. Why 1950? At that time Tezuka transformed manga from simple children's entertainment into a sophisticated medium children were reluctant to abandon as they grew older.

In 1954 when TV broadcasting began, only 866 TV sets existed. By 1959 when Japan went wild over the crown prince's wedding, there were 2 million. Television's weekly programming set the pace for information flow and entertainment in a post-war Japan undergoing rapid economic development. Other media followed. In 1956, the boom in weekly magazines started. In 1959, children's weeklies were launched. Initially, they focused on general information and entertainment; manga were no more than 40% of an issue. Circulation was low, about 200,000. Soon, however, editors realized the more manga they published, the higher the circulation. Educational items were phased out to the horror of educators and parents.

In Japan, no government hearings intimidated or crippled the comic book industry as in the U.S. Sales continued to rise. Adventure and sci-fi stories like Tezuka's dominated shounen (boys) magazines, but his readership aged. Teenagers, college students, and young laborers turned to rental bookstores, where sophisticated, serious manga (gekiga 'theatrical pictures') had been developing since the late '50s. Often grim, pensive or violent, rental manga focused on realistic drawing and content. Black humor predominated; there was no slapstick comic relief as in 'story manga' where the lowest common denominator had always been primary school boys. Popular artists working for gekiga manga included Sanpei Shirato and Takao Saitoh, known for The Legend of Kamui and Golgo 13.

In the late '60s rental books declined; seinen ('youth') manga hit the market. Some artists moved to shounen ('boys') manga, but many more worked for new seinen magazines, which soon ate into shounen circulation. Shounen magazines responded to the threat by incorporating a toned-down gekiga style to bring back older readers who found gekiga too oppressive. Seinen magazines reverted to story manga to add appeal. In the battle for older readers, leading shounen manga began to lose younger boys, their traditional readers. Circulation plummeted. Shueisha's Jump, a latecomer underdog founded in 1968, stayed faithful to preteens and took the lead in the early 1970's. Their greatest handicap, inability to attract the most famous artists, became its greatest advantage. While older competition had to give their star artists free rein, Jump told rookies to meet reader demands. Jump continues to publish blockbuster hits like long-running Dragonball by Akira Toriyama and more recently Slam Dunk by Takehiko Inoue. In 1980, Jump's circulation was 3 million, in 1985, 4 million; in 1988, 5 million; in 1994, an amazing 6.2 million, far and away the best-selling magazine in Japan. The competition in 1994 was at 3.74 million and 1.27 million.

Part 3: Girls' Manga
Like shounen manga, shoujo ('girls') manga rose in the decade after 1945. Magazines for primary school girls had simple, humorous comic strips like those in US newspapers until 1954 when Tezuka pioneered longer, more technically, sophisticated stories with adventure, drama, fantasy, tragedy, humor and romance in Ribon no kishi ('Knight of the Ribbon'). In the 1950's and early 60's, men drew shounen and shoujo manga. Mother-daughter relationships predominated. Boy-meets-girl stories were rare, due to readers' ages. Shoujo manga shifted to weeklies in 1963.

Publishers needed artists; they sought out women. From 1967 to '69, a steady stream of new artists turned to a flood, focusing on the Fabulous '49ers born in 1949: Moto Hagio (They Were Eleven and A, A'), Yumiko Ohshima, Keiko Takemiya (Toward the Terra), Riyo Ikeda (Rose of Versailles on the left), and Ryoko Yamagishi. They rejected the limitations of traditional Rose of Versailles shoujo manga, experimented with new themes, stories and styles to appeal increasingly to older readers. They dealt with gender, sexuality, science fiction, the weightiest issues of human existence. Interestingly, weekly shouojo did not last: artists felt weeklies made them focus on action and work at a pace that made depth difficult. Weeklies became bi-weeklies, then monthlies.

As with men, women born after 1950 read manga as adults. By the end of the '70s, shoujo manga were no longer homogeneous. Science fiction, fantasy and homosexual romance were distinct from the mainstream, more sophisticated heterosexual romantic comedies, now less governed by taboo. In the early 1980's, they narrowly targeted clerks and housewives with manga like sleazy U.S. soap operas, but young adult women did not buy the new 'ladies' comics'. They continued with shoujo manga from high school days. Finally in the '90s manga for adult women branched out: 'artsy' publications like the progressive Feel Young, conservative topseller YOU, mainstream newcomer Chorus, and clearly pornographic Comic Amour. Few 7th grade girls (except diehard Sailor Moon or Ray Earth fans) still read Nakayoshi, while others give up Ribon by high school. Margaret makes more conservative manga readers blush; Hana to yume stigmatizes sci-fi/ fantasy geeks; the popular Special Edition Margaret strikes some as too middle-of-the-road. Even today, Americans read novels on trains, but everyone, even businessmen, reads comic books in Japan.