Manga
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Manga is Japanese for comics and print cartoons. Outside of Japan, it usually refers specifically to Japanese comics. Manga is big business in Japan, and manga are read fervently by adults and children alike.
Manga developed from a mixture of Japanese and foreign styles of drawing, and took its current form shortly after World War II. It comes mainly in black and white, except for the covers and sometimes the first few pages; in some Animanga all the pages are colored. Popular manga are often adapted into anime (animations) once a market interest has been established.
Manga as people know it in the 20th and 21st centuries only really came into being with Dr. Osamu Tezuka, In 1945, Tezuka who was studying medicine, saw a war propaganda animation film called Momotarou Uminokaihei whose style was largely influenced by Disney's Fantasia. As a children's film, the main theme of Fantasia was peace and hope in a time of darkness. Tezuka was greatly inspired by the film and later decided to become a comic artist, which at the time (and even now) was an unthinkable choice for a qualified medical doctor.
Tezuka introduced film-like storytelling and character in comic format in which each short film-like episode is part of larger story arc. The only text in Tezuka's comics was the characters' dialogue and this lent the comics a cinematic quality. Tezuka also adopted Disney-like facial features where a character's eyes, mouth, eyebrows and nose are drawn in a very exaggerated manner to add more distinct characterization with fewer lines, which made his work popular.
Tezuka adapted his comic to almost all film genres of the time; his manga series range from action adventure (e.g. Kimba the White Lion, also known as Jungle Emperor Leo) to serious drama (e.g. Black Jack) to science fiction (e.g. Astro Boy), horror (e.g. Dororo, The Three-eyed One.) Though he is known in the West as a creator of the children's animation Astro Boy, many of his comics had some very mature and sometimes dark undertones. Most of his comics' central characters had a tragic background. For instance, Atom (Astro Boy) was created by a grieving scientist who wanted to create an imitation of his dead son and later abandoned the boy; Kimba's father was killed by human hunters and the conflict between man and nature was a recurring theme for the comic; Hyakkimaru in Dororo was born severely crippled because his father offered 48 parts of Dororo's infant body to 48 demons.
As the manga generation of children grew up, the market for comics expanded accordingly and manga soon become a major cultural force of Japan. Tezuka also contributed to the social acceptance of manga. His qualification as a medical doctor as well as the holder of Ph.D in medical science as well as his serious storylines were used to deflect criticism that manga was vulgar and undesirable for children. He also mentored a number of important comic artists, such as Fujiko Fujio (creator of Doraemon), Fujio Akatsuka and Shotaro Ishinomori.
Another important trend in manga was gekiga ("Dramatic Pictures"). Between the 1960s and the 1970s, there were two forms of comic serialization. One, the manga format, was based on the sales of anthology magazines which contained dozen of titles. The other, gekiga, was based on a rental format of an individual manga "book" of single title. Manga was based on weekly or biweekly magazine publications, so production was prompt, and the deadline was paramount. Consequently, most manga artists adopted Tezuka's style of drawing, where characters are drawn in a simpler but exaggerated manner, typified by the large round eyes regarded abroad as a defining feature of Japanese comics. In contrast, gekiga typically had more complex and mature story lines, with higher production value per page. For this reason, gekiga was considered to be artistically much superior. However, gekiga's rental business model eventually died out in the 1970s, while manga artists significantly improved their graphic quality. Eventually, gekiga was absorbed into manga and now is used to describe a manga style which does not use cartoon-like drawing. The gekiga-style manga most famous abroad is probably Akira.
However, gekiga did not only influence the art style of manga: after the 70s, more mature-themed pictures and plot lines were used in manga. Many had significant depictions of violence and sexual activity, and were marketed at teenagers: unlike in Tezuka's time, children in the 70s had more disposable income, so they could directly purchase manga without asking their parents to buy it for them. Thus, manga publishers did not need to justify their products to the parents. Moreover, the dominance of the serialized manga format on a weekly basis meant that manga was increasingly becoming "pulp fiction", with large amounts of violent content and some nudity (especially, although not exclusively, in manga aimed at boys). Representative titles of this genre were Harenchi Gakuen by Go Nagai and Makoto-chan by Kazuo Umezu, both of which had copious amounts of gore, nudity, and vulgar (often scatological) jokes. Much like in the United States during the Comic book scare in the 40's and 50's, teachers and parents had objections to the content of manga, but unlike the U.S. no attempt was made to create an oversight board like the Comics Code Authority. Interestingly, manga magazines "for children" in the 70s arguably had more vulgar themes (due to the fact that it was the only major publishing format available), but by the 80s and 90s, new magazines catering to teenagers and young adults had come into play.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Manga"