Manga

It is hard to define manga in a phrase. Japan’s Nipponica encyclopedia treats the word as a catch-all for a field of pictures known under many labels, such as caricature, cartoon, gekiga and comic, and sorts today’s manga into two broad kinds: cartoons, which are single-picture manga, and comics, which tell a story in panels. The word itself once meant something looser. In Hokusai Manga (first volume, 1814) it was close to what we would now call a sketch, and it took hold among the public only in the early Shōwa era (the Shōwa era began in 1926). After the war, new manga magazines multiplied from 1946, and Tezuka Osamu’s children’s manga, which borrowed film techniques with an eye on animation, became popular and strongly shaped later manga. In the lending-library magazines of the 1950s, realistic story manga for young readers came to be called gekiga, and in 1959 the first weekly magazines for boys, Shōnen Sunday and Shōnen Magazine, were launched.

Pick one page and read it in order, noticing which panels are big, which are small, and how that changes how long you stay on each scene.

• Shōjo manga 少女漫画→A category of manga with its own card.