What Is Manga? Japan's Comics and Where They Began

Manga is the name for comics and graphic novels developed and popularised in Japan. They are usually printed in black and white, serialised in weekly or monthly magazines, and later collected into bound volumes. The word is older than many people assume: it was in use by the late 18th century, and Hokusai named a popular collection of picture books manga in the 1810s. Modern manga took clearer shape around 1900, and historians still argue about how far back its roots reach.

This guide covers what manga is, what the word means, the older art that fans often point to, and how the modern form emerged. It is spoiler-free: no plot twists here, just history. It is also an unofficial fan guide, so for the manga themselves, look to official, licensed editions from publishers and libraries rather than unofficial scans.

What manga is

Britannica describes manga as a style of comic books and graphic novels developed and popularised in Japan. It is usually printed in black and white, and it usually appears first in weekly or monthly magazines. Because manga is a broad style rather than a single format, it is safest to say usually rather than always when describing its printing.

Chapters of a series are often gathered into a bound volume called a tankōbon. If you know American comics, think of a trade paperback: the same idea of collecting serialised instalments into a book you can shelve.

The word also shifts depending on where you are. Inside Japan, it refers to all comics, whatever their origin. Outside Japan, it mostly means comics from Japan, although some people also use it for non-Japanese comics with a manga-like style.

What the word means

Hokusai named his popular collection of printed drawings manga. The word was first written with two characters: 漫, meaning diverse, random or rambling, and 画, meaning picture. That is why you will see several English glosses. Britannica gives aimless pictures, while other sources offer whimsical pictures or random pictures. The translation varies, and none of them is the single correct one.

Even the starting point is contested. Wikipedia says the term was already in use in the late 18th century, before Hokusai, so it is better to treat the origin of the word as disputed rather than settled.

The meaning also changed over time. Around 1900, with the rise of modern newspapers, manga came to mean a satirical picture, and it became everyday usage in the 1920s. Through the 20th century it stretched to cover cartoons, caricatures, comic strips and, eventually, graphic narratives serialised in manga magazines.

Hokusai and older roots

Hokusai began issuing his Hokusai manga picture books in 1814. The best-known edition runs to 15 volumes, but sources disagree on when it ended. Wikipedia gives 1814 to 1834, while the British Museum and the Portland Japanese Garden give 1814 to 1878. The Portland piece describes an 800-page edition in 15 stitched-bound volumes with 4,000 images in three colours.

Hokusai also worked in kibyōshi, comic fiction from the 1780s and 1790s that was full of comedy and satire. Tim Clark of the British Museum calls these comic books for adults, rather like modern manga.

Many fans treat Hokusai's work as the origin of today's manga, and the Portland exhibition openly asks whether modern manga shares anything beyond the name. Historians disagree. Wikipedia notes that emakimono scrolls are often said to be early ancestors, yet Isao Takahata argues there is no link between those scrolls and modern manga.

Kern has suggested that kibyōshi picture books may have been the world's first comic books, but does not think they were a direct forerunner of manga. As the British Museum puts it, the history of manga is complicated.

How modern manga took shape

Kitazawa Rakuten (1876 to 1955) was the first artist to use the word in its modern sense. His Jiji Manga appeared in the newspaper Jiji Shinpō in 1900, and in 1902 he began the first modern Japanese comic strip.

The speech-balloon form is linked to Japanese translations of American comic strips in the 1920s. Wikipedia describes two schools of thought on the bigger picture: one stresses continuity with Japanese art traditions, the other stresses American influence after 1945. The British Museum adds a telling detail, that Osamu Tezuka was watching Disney cartoons as much as Hokusai prints.

By the 1930s, comic strips were serialised in large-circulation monthly magazines for girls and boys and collected into hardback volumes. Tezuka's first hit in a comic-strip-type manga book, New Treasure Island, came out in Osaka in 1947.

Styles then diversified. The dramatic gekiga style developed from the 1960s, initially in the magazine Garo, which ran from 1964 to 2002. Clark suggests Hokusai's action illustrations can be seen as precursors of gekiga, though that is his interpretation.

Scale and what is not yet confirmed

Britannica reports that manga sales reached 1.4 billion copies a year, books and magazines combined, by 1984, and 2.3 billion by 1995. In 2002 there were 278 different manga magazines. Shonen Jump's circulation peaked in 1995 at 6.5 million, with an estimated readership of about 20 million.

Those figures stop at 1995 and 2002. Current sales totals and up-to-date industry data were not confirmed in the sources used here, so this article does not give them. The date of the first manga magazine could not be confirmed from the sources checked, so it is left out rather than guessed.

If this has made you curious to read rather than just read about manga, our guides on manga versus Western comics and on where to start with manga are good next steps, and our short history of the comic strip fills in the wider picture.