Year 24 Group
Individuals who have been associated with the Year 24 Group include Yasuko Aoike, Moto Hagio, Riyoko Ikeda, Toshie Kihara, Minori Kimura, Yumiko Ōshima, Nanae Sasaya, Keiko Takemiya, Mineko Yamada [ja], and Ryōko Yamagishi.
These new artists drew inspiration from a diversity of sources, including European literature and cinema, American rock and roll culture, and the Bildungsroman genre.
[2] The so-called "Ōizumi Salon", a rented house in Ōizumigakuenchō, Nerima, Tokyo that manga artists Moto Hagio and Keiko Takemiya shared as roommates from 1971 to 1973, came to be an important gathering point for members and affiliates of the Year 24 Group.
Hagio and Takemiya made the house available to shōjo artists for use as living and working space, allowing them to both bond socially, share ideas and influences, and collaborate on manga.
[12] In 1972, two major works of shōjo manga were published by members of the group: The Rose of Versailles by Riyoko Ikeda, and The Poe Clan by Hagio.
[21] These protagonists were often bishōnen – literally "beautiful boys", distinguished by their androgynous appearances – or were characters that blur gender distinctions, such as the crossdressing Oscar François de Jarjayes of The Rose of Versailles.
Works focused on male protagonists were often homosocial or homoerotic in nature, and helped lay the foundation for the boys' love genre (male-male romance, also known as "BL" or yaoi).
[41] Critics noted how works by the group considered women as human beings, rather than as the idealized young girls of early shōjo manga.
[41] Comiket, the world's largest comic convention, was founded by the dōjinshi circle Meikyu [ja] to study the works of various manga artists, including Hagio and other members of Year 24 Group.
[42] Critic Osamu Takeuchi argues that the shift in shōjo manga that the Year 24 Group represented is an example of how shōjo manga in the 1970s was changing "from simple entertainment to a vehicle of self-expression for the author"; Eiji Ōtsuka compares this shift to the discovery of interiority in early Meiji fiction, while Inuhiko Yomota sees the Year 24 Group as analogous to New Wave cinema.
[43] Works by the Year 24 Group have nevertheless come to be regarded by critics as "classics" of the genre, both for their aesthetic and thematic quality, and for the "visual grammar" they established which influenced subsequent generations of manga artists.
