Some Early History
The very first manga was a bunch of picture scrolls that were created during the 6th and 7th centuries by Buddhist monks. The scrolls used common symbols (e.g. cherry blossoms and red leaves). They indicated the passage of time. The most famous of these types of manga was Choujuugiga, which means "animal scroll". Animals behaved like humans and some of the animals "role-played" the lives of Buddhist priests.
Around the beginning of the 13th century, pictures were being drawn on temple walls about the vast future and animals. These pictures were crude and heavily exagerrated. This phenomenon continued over a period of many hundred years. Many other subjects were included, and the style remained the same.
Very Early Manga
In 1702 Shumboko Ono, a very early artist, made a book out of prints of the pictures and included some captions, even though it was only a collection of pictures and not really much of a story. This method began to develop over the next 100 years. The tradition of Toba-e (the name of these comics), grew over the next century, until they became the main form of literature for most of the Japanese society. The most popular ones were called ukiyo-e, portraits of the "floating world". These illustrations were images of scenes from the red-light district, though they also met certain age standards, such as the latest outfits and the most popular places to visit. In the late 18th century, kibyoushi (yellow covers) gained popularity.
In 1815, the word "manga" was created by Hokusai, an amazing artist who lived from 1760-1849 and completed over 30,000 works of art. His new term for some of his artwork was made from the words "man", which means professional documents and "ga", which means picture.
When Japan was introduced to the outside world, European artists began to introduce shading, perspective, and anatomy (types of drawing). They also introduced word balloons (bubbles) and separate sequences. Also, new printing techniques were introduced at this time. These turned out to be much better than woodblock prints. Under European influence, Japanese people started making humor magazines that were similar to Punch. The most famous of these was Marumaru Chimbun (1877).
At the end of 19th century, the first comic strips appeared in John Pulitzer's New York World (a newspaper company). During the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Japanese government began intimidating artists and publishers. Many magazines either closed all together or started censoring themselves harshly; magazines who didn't do either of those usually got their editors arrested. These types of arrests happened so often that magazines would sometimes pick an employee to be a "jail editor". They would do the jail time while trying to save their company.
After World War II, cartoons began to get less popular. The publishers who had been powerful before the war were now in shambles (going out of business), 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 is Osamu Tezuka. Mighty Atom was his most popular creation, and is famous around the world; this was later broadcasted as Astro Boy in the 1960s.
After drawing four-panel comic strips for newspapers, Tezuka was showed in comic books in 1947 with New Treasure Island, a story published as a red book (akahon). These were cheap comics named for the blotchy red ink on the cover. Akahon were a small industries that provided children with the little entertainment that was affordable after the war. New Treasure Island changed manga overnight, selling a total of 400,000 copies.
In 1956, Toei Animation was founded. Its president, Hiroshi Okawa, wanted to create a Japanese film studio that can possibly compare to Walt Disney's studios. Its first film, "The Tale of the White Serpent", was released in 1958. This film and the next few the studio created, paved the way for animations for more mature viewers. Later, Tezuka Osamu founded his own animation company. He focused on creating movies and series for being broadcasted on TV. Tetsuwan Atomu became the first Japanese animated TV series.
Shounen Manga
In 1956, the boom in weekly magazines had began. In 1959, children's weekly magazines were released. These focused on general information and entertainment; manga took the space of up to 40% of an issue. Soon, editors realized that the more manga they published, the more popular manga would be all around the world.
Teenagers, college students, and young laborers went over to rental bookstores, where sophisticated, serious manga (gekiga) had been developing since the late 1950s. Rental manga, often grim or violent, focused on realistic drawings and realistic content. Some popular artists that worked on gekiga manga included Sanpei Shirato and Takao Saitoh. They were best known for making The Legend of Kamui and Golgo 13.
In the late 1960s rental books began declining; seinen (childish) manga began to hit the market. Some artists began to work on shounen (boys) manga, but a bunch more artists worked for the new seinen magazines, which soon caused shounen circulation to decrease. Shounen magazines responded to this threat by incorporating a toned-down gekiga style to bring back the more mature readers who found gekiga to be too oppressive. Seinen magazines reverted to story manga to attract more readers. In the battle for older readers, shounen manga began to lose younger male readers, the people who usually read shounen manga. Circulation began to plummet (go back up again). Shueisha's Jump, an underdog company founded in 1968, saved shounen manga's a$$ in the early 1970's. Their greatest handicap was having the ability to attract the most famous artists; this became its greatest advantage. Jump (known as Shonen Jump now) continues to publish blockbuster hits like Dragonball by Akira Toriyama and more recently Slam Dunk by Takehiko Inoue. In 1980, Jump's circulation was 3 million, 1985, 4 million; 1988, 5 million; 1994, an amazing 6.2 million. This soon became the best-selling magazine in Japan. The competition in 1994 was at 3.74 million and 1.27 million. All titles by Jump are amazing!
Shoujo Manga
Like shounen manga, shoujo ('girls') manga began to get popular in the mid-1950s. Magazines for primary school girls had simple, humorous comic strips like the ones in US newspapers. This stopped in 1954 when Tezuka began working on longer, sophisticated stories with adventure, drama, fantasy, tragedy, humor and romance in a manga called Ribon no kishi ('Knight of the Ribbon'). An example of a type of shoujo manga is mother-daughter relationships, and boy-meets-girl stories were rare because of the ages of the readers. Shoujo manga began making weekly issues in 1963.
Publishers needed artists, so they began looking for women. From 1967 to 1969, a bunch of new artists who began focusing on the "Fabulous '49ers" (made in 1949). Some of these artists include, Moto Hagio who made "They Were Eleven and A, A", Yumiko Ohshima, Keiko Takemiya who made, "Toward the Terra", Riyo Ikeda who made "Rose of Versailles on the left", and Ryoko Yamagishi. They didn't like the limitations of Rose of Versailles. They also experimented with new themes, stories, and styles to attracting older readers. They had to deal with with gender, sexuality, science fiction, and the lengthy issues of human existence. Weekly shoujo did not last for too long; artists felt weeklies made them focus on action and work at a strenuous pace, in which they wouldn't get everything they wanted accomplished. Weeklies became bi-weeklies, and eventually monthlies.
Women born after 1950 read manga as adults, and so did men. Science fiction, fantasy and homosexual romance (man+man) were much different than the mainstream, more sophisticated heterosexual romantic comedies (man+woman), which is what they make now. In the early 1980s, they targeted clerks and housewives with manga that was like sleazy U.S. soap operas, but young adult women did not buy this type of comics. They still bought shoujo manga. In the 1990s, for adult women, there were 'artsy' publications. Few 7th grade girls (except extreme Sailor Moon or Rayearth fans) still read Nakayoshi, while others gave up Ribon by high school. The popular Special Edition Margaret strikes some as too middle-of-the-road (average). Even today, Americans read novels on trains/airplanes, but everyone, even businessmen, reads comic books in Japan.
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