For most western people, the word manga is related almost exclusively to a style of film and children's animation. The word itself is created by a famous woodblock print artist, Hokusai, at around the 17th century. It is the combination of two Chinese characters, the first meaning "lax ?or "in spite of oneself" and the second meaning "picture".

A millennium before the term was invented; cartoon-like drawings can be found in Japan. The picture scrolls of medieval Japan combine pictures and text to tell story or describe events. Around seven hundred years later, pictures were drawn on temple walls, depicting images of the afterlife and of animals. These pictures were crude and deliberately exaggerated representations, and looked like modern manga or comics in many ways. Around the start of the 17th century, these pictures were made attractions in themselves for the first time. They were beginning to be drawn on wood blocks, known as Edo. The subjects were less religious, often graphically erotic, and branched out to include various other subjects, particularly buildings and satire.

In 1702 Shumboko Ono, an early celebrity manga artist, printed a book out of collection of pictures with captions. This method developed over the next few hundred years, in books which combined stories with illustrations for every paragraph, allowing the art to be just as sequential as the narrative and the narrative to be more frenetic and pacy. The tradition of Toba-e, as these comics were called, grew over the next century, until they were the main forms of literature for most of Japanese society. In the late eighteenth-century Japan, a growing middle class of urban merchants developed a manga-like medium produced for popular consumption. These books are printed using the woodblock technology, kibyoushi, as storybooks for adults where narration and dialogue were placed in or around ink-brush and dealt with a variety of subjects, such as humour, drama, fantasy, and pornography. The development of cartoon film first began in Europe and then the United States, but despite being taken up late, it was more of a phenomenon in Japan, where over forty percent of the country's film output was in the form of manga films after 1940. In the Western world cartoons have always been seen as a child's phenomenon, but in Japan manga has always been the method of art for all age groups. In the late nineteenth century, Japan was aggressively importing Western culture, knowledge and technology. Kibyoushi were replaced by a hybrid of native and Western cartooning forms, resulting in satirical publications similar to the old Punch.

Perhaps the one very important factor in the creation of the modern manga industry was the work of one artist, the late Tezuka Osamu, known in Japan as the "god of manga." Tezuka's most popular creation, Mighty Atom, is known throughout the world. An animated version was even broadcast in the U.S. in the 1960's under the name "Astro Boy." After the war, Tezuka made his comic book debut in 1947 with a story entitled New Treasure Island. It was published as an akahon, or "red book," a cheap form of comic book named after the gaudy red ink used on the covers. At the time, akahon was a small niche industry providing children with one of the few entertainment media they could afford in the crushing poverty of early post-war Japan. New Treasure Island changed the scene overnight, selling up to 400,000 copies. Publishers responded immediately and enthusiastically, and had no trouble in finding young artists eager to learn about Tezuka's revolutionary style. Tezuka moved to a rundown apartment building in Tokyo to be closer to the publishing industry, and quickly developed a following of budding manga artists, some of whom actually moved into the same apartment building. Most of these artists went on to become giants of the post-war manga industry.

Today the main exports of manga are either children's television or manga films for a more selective audience, but in Japan manga is still primarily used in the form of paper cartoons, and for purposes other than entertainment. A guide to economics has even been printed in manga, and most magazines targeted at all age groups are framed in manga.

Done by SonicOng

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