If you really want to understand anime, you have to understand manga. Really understanding manga means you need to know a little about where it came from. It’s also fun to know why things today look like they do.
Manga started in Japan as entertainment for children. In the 1950s, manga could be rented from libraries for a few yen. (Believe it or not, in Japan they had and still have pay libraries – you pay a small fee to rent a book, unlike most American libraries, where as long as you have a library card you can borrow books for free.)
Boys’ comics, or shounen, focused on historical adventure, samurai stories, and sports, while girls’ titles, or shoujo, focused on romance or puppy love.
One creator was popular with boys and girls. Osamu Tezuka, who wrote and illustrated in a Disney-influenced style, created an enormously popular series called New Treasure Island. He also created a character and series named Ambassador Atom, renamed Astro Boy in the United States. His style was so popular most manga for the next twenty years was illustrated in a similar style.
The Insider’s Guide To Anime
While true comic books have been around for less than one hundred years, Japanese artists have been producing illustrated books for centuries. Today, Japanese comic books and graphic novels are referred to as “manga”. Order Now
Later in the 1950s, science fiction stories became really popular, especially stories with robots in them. Tezuka’sAmbassador Atom (obviously he liked the word “atom”) ran in a magazine called Shonen Magazine for nine years. It was about a robot that could never become fully human. (If it sounds like it was a rip-off of Pinocchio, it was. Tezuka later admitted he “borrowed” the story from Pinocchio as the basis for his story about Ambassador Atom.)
By the way – if you’re starting to think Tezuka was responsible for basically creating the comics industry in Japan after World War II, you’re right.
An animated TV series based on Ambassador Atom followed in 1963. It was so popular that it started a robot craze, and hundreds of artists and series were created that basically copied Tezuka’s series. (He shouldn’t have been too mad about that, since he got the original idea for his story from Pinocchio.)
Manga boomed in the 1960s, becoming more popular in Japan than comic books have ever been in the United States. People in Japan who begin reading manga as children can read different types of manga as they grow up. In the United States, comic books are often considered to be for kids only. Adults in Japan don’t look down on people who read manga, because most adults at least occasionally are reading adult-oriented manga themselves.
As manga grew, science fiction stayed popular, but adult readers could choose from a ton of different types: horror, adventure, games, comedy, martial arts…. It might seem odd to us, but in Japan you can learn to cook, learn to fix your car, study for tests, learn about politics… all from manga. (It’s weird to think you can learn about how to fix a car from a comic book… but in Japan you can. It’s not unusual at all to the average Japanese.)
Instead of reading manga from pay libraries, purchasing manga quickly became more popular. Manga creators became celebrities, and had as many fans as music or movie stars. Manga is now incredibly popular: some people estimate that manga makes up thirty to forty percent of all publishing in Japan: that’s thirty to forty percent of all the books, magazines, etc. That means if you walked in a Japanese bookstore, about one-third of the shelves would be filled with manga.
Creators and publishers of manga quickly figured out how to make money. Stories first were run as part of larger magazines – each magazine might have five hundred to one thousand pages (they were huge), but an individual series might only make up ten or twelve of those pages. You could read episodes from a bunch of different series in one magazine. Imagine being able to read twelve pages each in one magazine of Dragon Ball Z, Tenchi Muyo, Outlaw Star, Inuyasha, Sakura Wars, .hack//Sign… and every month you’d get new installments of each series. They were all just parts of a magazine that thousands of people bought. If a particular story turned out to be popular, its creators would then print a book devoted to that series alone – creating the Japanese version of a graphic novel.
Manga was so popular in Japan that American companies noticed. There were problems with bringing manga to America, though. For one thing, they needed to be translated into English. Then, the pages needed to be “flopped,” because Japanese books read from right to left, instead of from left to right like in America.
Artwork would also have to be changed sometimes: Japanese words for some sounds are different from English words. Japanese comics use onomatopoeia just like American comics do. Onomatopoeia means that a word sounds like what it describes: for instance, “buzz,” or “bang,” or “hiss.” Sometimes those words were drawn as part of the artwork. An explosion might have the word “bang” drawn in large Japanese letters beside it, so that art would have to be changed.
