History of manga
[3][19] Professor Richard Torrance has pointed to similarities between modern manga and the Osaka popular novel, written 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.
The most popular illustrators associated with this style at the time were Yumeji Takehisa and Jun'ichi Nakahara, who, influenced by his work as a doll creator, frequently drew female characters with big eyes in the early 20th century.
Murakami sees Japan's surrender 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.
Japanese artists subsequently gave life to their own style during the occupation (1945–1952) and post-occupation years (1952–1972),[38] when a previously militarist and ultranationalist Japan was rebuilding its political and economic infrastructure.
[40] 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 seen in Article 9 of the newly created Japanese constitution.
[3][40] By contrast, Sazae-san (meaning "Ms. Sazae") was commenced in 1946 by Hasegawa, a young woman artist who made her heroine a stand-in for millions of Japanese citizens, especially women, rendered homeless by the war.
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" (良妻賢母, ryōsai kenbo) ideal taught by the previous military regime.
[3] More critically, he synchronised the placement of the panel with the reader's viewing speed to simulate moving pictures; this kind of visual dynamism was widely adopted by later manga artists.
[50] Two very popular and influential male-authored manga for girls from this period were Tezuka's 1953-1956 Ribon no Kishi (Princess Knight) and Mitsuteru Yokoyama's 1966 Mahōtsukai Sarī (Sally the Witch).
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.
[53][54] The group included Hagio Moto, Riyoko Ikeda, Yumiko Ōshima, Keiko Takemiya, and Ryoko Yamagishi,[41] and they marked the first major entry of women artists into manga.
[3][49][50] In 1971, Ikeda began her immensely popular shōjo manga Berusaiyu no Bara (The Rose of Versailles), the 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 its focus on the heroine's inner experiences and feelings, shōjo manga are "picture poems"[58] with delicate and complex designs that often eliminate panel borders completely to create prolonged, non-narrative extensions of time.
[3][41][49][50][59] The group's contributions in their stories – strong and independent female characters, intense emotionality, and complex design – remain characteristic of shōjo manga to the present day.
[60] Major subgenres have included romance, superheroines, and "Ladies Comics" (in Japanese, redisu (レディース), redikomi (レディコミ), and josei (女性 じょせい)), of which boundaries are sometimes indistinguishable from each other and from shōnen manga.
[62] These romances are sometimes long narratives that can distinguish between false and true love, coping with sexual intercourse, and growing up in an ambivalent world; these themes are inherited by subsequent animated versions of the story.
[82] Presently, the superheroine narrative template has been widely used and parodied within the shōjo manga tradition (e.g., Nao Yazawa's Wedding Peach[83] and Hyper Rune by Tamayo Akiyama[84]), as well as outside it, (e.g., in bishōjo comedies like Broccoli's Galaxy Angel).
[111][112] Early shōnen and seinen manga narratives often portrayed challenges to the protagonist's abilities, skills, and maturity; they stressed self-perfection, austere self-discipline, sacrifice in the cause of duty, and honorable service to society, community, family, and friends.
[119] This new archetype was put on display in Neon Genesis Evangelion by Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, where Shinji struggles against the enemy and his father; it was repeated in The Vision of Escaflowne by Katsu Aki, where Van not only makes war against Dornkirk's empire, but must deal with his complex feelings for Hitomi, the heroine.
However, the hero may also be (or was) human, battling an ever-escalating series of supernatural enemies (Hiromu Arakawa's Fullmetal Alchemist, Nobuyuki Anzai's Flame of Recca, and Tite Kubo's Bleach).
Military action-adventure stories set in the modern world (for example, about WWII) remained under suspicion of glorifying Japan's Imperial history[110] and have not become a significant part of the shōnen manga repertoire.
[110] Examples include Katushiro Otomo's Akira (manga) which is considered to have popularized the manga medium worldwide with its anime film in 1988, and Seiho Takizawa's Who Fighter, an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness that tells of a renegade Japanese colonel set in WWII Burma; Kaiji Kawaguchi's The Silent Service, about a Japanese nuclear submarine; and the seinen Motofumi Kobayashi's Cat Shit One (released as Apocalypse Meow in the U.S.) about the Vietnam War told in talking animal format.
Other battle and fight-oriented manga sometimes focus on criminal and espionage conspiracies to be overcome by the protagonist, such as in Crying Freeman by Kazuo Koike and Ryoichi Ikegami,[122] City Hunter by Tsukasa Hojo, and the shōjo series From Eroica with Love by Yasuko Aoike, a long-running crime-espionage story combining adventure, action, and humor (and another example of how these themes occur across demographics).
Some recent shōnen manga virtually omit women, e.g., the martial arts story Baki the Grappler by Keisuke Itagaki and the supernatural fantasy Sand Land by Akira Toriyama.
[128] The male protagonist does not always succeed in forming a relationship with the bishōjo; for example, when Bright Honda and Aimi Komori fail to bond in Shadow Lady by Masakazu Katsura.
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.
Faced with criticism from certain segments of the population and under pressure from industry groups to self-regulate, major publishing houses discontinued series, such as Angel and 1+2=Paradise; smaller publication companies, not as susceptible to these forces, were able to fill the void.
[7][135] With the relaxation of censorship in Japan after the early 1990s, various forms of graphically drawn sexual content appeared in manga intended for male readers that correspondingly occurred in English translations.
[148] Gekiga can be seen as the Japanese equivalent of the graphic novel culture occurring in Europe (Hugo Pratt, Didier Comès, and Jacques Tardi), in the U.S. (Will Eisner's A Contract with God, Art Spiegelman's Maus, and Robert Crumb's autobiographical works) and in South America (Alberto Breccia and Héctor Germán Oesterheld).
[141][146][149] Examples include Koike and Kojima's Lone Wolf and Cub,[150] and Osamu Tezuka's 1976 manga MW, a bitter story of the aftermath of the storage and possibly deliberate release of poison gas by the U.S. armed forces based in Okinawa years after World War II.
