Japanese Manga  

        Japanese Manga is a type of cartoon from Japan, written in Japanese. Japanese Manga is very popular because there are about 1 billion comics published every year. Manga was created during the 1800’s by a Japanese artist named Katsushika Hokusai. Before Manga existed, there were different names that the Japanese called their popular visual stories and other entertainment sort of books like - giga, and a newer term, gegika. Japanese Manga has become the world leader in comic distribution because of its popularity with it being publicized all over the world on in all sorts of comic books. The Manga industry is so massive that it has overshadowed the two big companies in the U.S and in France. The average Japanese spends about 2,000 yen or 20 dollars annually just on Manga magazines and the population for Japan is about 120 million people. There are about 3 main Manga publishing companies in Japan- Kodansha, Shogakkan, and Shueisha. Just in Japan there are about 3,000 professional Manga artists. It is really successful, selling many copies in a year.

      Japanese Manga is divided into two major categories. The first category is targeted towards youths ranging from young children to young adults. The second category is mostly for adults. Like we have also talked about on our website the rise of Manga artist started after World War 2, due to so many issues having to do with all the social problems going on in the world during that time, just like the U.S created Captain America due to the war, there were many new Manga. Manga at this time still had kid’s genres but due to the war theme it also entertained elders and adults and not just kids and teens.

   During the 1960's Manga had been developed into an art form for university students. Even more college students became avid Manga readers and it also grew as a visual media. So by the 1980's Manga had grown as visual and an entertaining thing to do and it is very popular in Japan.