A History of Manga, Part 2: Tezuka, Gekiga, and the Jump Era

Part 1 ended in 1941, with Norakuro cancelled and Japanese cartooning conscripted into the war effort. Part 2 picks up in the rubble of 1945 and runs to the mid-1990s: the two decades in which Osamu Tezuka invented the modern form, the rental-library rebels who answered him with gekiga, the weekly magazines that industrialized the medium, and the Shueisha anthology that pushed it to a circulation no comic has matched since.

Tezuka and the postwar boom (1945–1968)

The manga industry as it exists today begins in the wreckage of 1945. Paper was scarce, money was scarcer, and the first postwar comics were akahon ("red books") — cheap, small, garishly covered booklets sold by candy shops and street vendors, mostly out of Osaka.

On January 30, 1947, one of those red books changed the medium. Shin Takarajima (New Treasure Island) was conceived by Sakai Shichima and drawn by an 18-year-old medical student named Osamu Tezuka. Its opening pages — a car racing toward the reader, drawn from shifting angles across successive panels — read like storyboards for a film, and that was the point. Tezuka's official archive says the book "sold no more than 400,000 copies"; the British Museum says it "rapidly sold 400,000." Either figure was unheard of for a comic, and it made Tezuka the most sought-after artist in the country.

Over the next two decades Tezuka defined the modern form. Tetsuwan Atom (Astro Boy) began in 1952. Ribon no Kishi (Princess Knight), serialized in Kodansha's Shōjo Club from January 1953, brought his "story comic" approach to girls' magazines and is usually treated as the foundation of modern shōjo manga. On January 1, 1963, Fuji TV broadcast the first episode of the Astro Boy anime, the first Japanese weekly half-hour animated series; it ran 193 episodes, peaked at a 40.7 percent rating, and was syndicated in the United States by NBC Enterprises from September of that year. The pipeline from manga page to television screen, which drives the industry to this day, was built here.

Not everyone wanted to draw like Tezuka. In the rental-library (kashi-hon) market of the 1950s, a group of younger artists were making darker, more realistic comics for adult readers. In 1957 Yoshihiro Tatsumi coined a word for them: gekiga, "dramatic pictures." In 1959 he and seven others, including the future Golgo 13 creator Saitō Takao, formed the Gekiga Workshop in Tokyo and issued a manifesto. Tatsumi's own account of those years, A Drifting Life, was published in Japan in 2008 and in English by Drawn & Quarterly in 2009, where it won two Eisner Awards.

The same year the Gekiga Workshop formed, the format that would carry manga for the next 60 years arrived. On March 17, 1959, Kodansha launched Weekly Shōnen Magazine and Shogakukan launched Weekly Shōnen Sunday — the two publishers' own histories disagree on which was first, and they share a founding date, so "within days of each other" is the honest version. These were thick, cheaply printed anthologies carrying a dozen or more serialized stories per issue. Popular series were later collected into paperbacks called tankōbon. Magazine for discovery, tankōbon for keeping: that two-tier system is still how most manga reaches readers.

The Jump era (1968–1990s)

Shueisha entered the weekly market late. Weekly Shōnen Jump debuted on July 11, 1968, at first every two weeks, then weekly from 1969. It compensated for its late start with a system that its competitors did not have: every issue carried a reader survey postcard, and series that ranked poorly were cancelled fast. The result was a magazine ruthlessly tuned to what teenage boys wanted, and by the 1980s it had become the largest-circulation comics magazine in the world.

The 1970s were also the decade shōjo manga came into its own. A loose cohort of women artists born around 1949 (Shōwa 24 on the Japanese calendar, hence their later nickname, the Year 24 Group) — Moto Hagio, Keiko Takemiya, Yumiko Ōshima, Ryōko Yamagishi — brought psychological depth, science fiction, and same-sex romance to girls' magazines with works like The Poe Clan (1972) and The Heart of Thomas (1974). Riyoko Ikeda's The Rose of Versailles, a French Revolution epic serialized in Shueisha's Margaret from May 1972 to December 1973, sold more than 23 million copies and became a Takarazuka Revue stage production in 1974 that has been restaged repeatedly since.

Jump's peak came in the first half of the 1990s. Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball (November 1984 – May 1995, 519 chapters, 42 volumes), Takehiko Inoue's basketball drama Slam Dunk (1990–96), and Yoshihiro Togashi's Yu Yu Hakusho (1990–94) ran side by side. The 1995 New Year's double issue — on sale at the end of December 1994, which is why some sources say 1994 — printed 6.53 million copies, a figure no comics magazine anywhere has matched since. Then Dragon Ball ended, and the number fell: 5.88 million in 1996, 4.05 million in 1997. In 1998 Kodansha's Shōnen Magazine overtook Jump for the first time in 24 years.

Outside the boys' weeklies, the seinen (young men's) magazines produced the works that would matter most abroad. Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira ran in Kodansha's Young Magazine from December 1982 to June 1990 and was adapted into a film in 1988. Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind ran in the anime magazine Animage from 1982 to 1994, interrupted by the 1984 film that launched Studio Ghibli. Masamune Shirow's Ghost in the Shell (1989–90) followed.

The scale of the industry at its peak is hard to overstate. In 1995 the Japanese manga market was worth about ¥586 billion, with 1.9 billion manga books and magazines sold in a year — roughly 15 per person. The oft-quoted claim that manga made up "about 40 percent" of everything published in Japan comes from this period; the figure is cited by the scholar Yukari Fujimoto and by contemporary press coverage, though the base (units, titles, or revenue) varies by source.

Continue to Part 3 →Manga Goes Global, Then Digital (1978 – 2026)

Sources for Part 2