The Origins of Manga

The manga is a comic originating from japan. Even though they are inspired by western comics. Manga is very diverse targeting people from different age groups with different genres, unlike western comics that mostly targeted children and teenagers. The first manga came out in 1947 although they were inspired by western comics the word, on the other hand, takes us back to 12th-century japan. In this post, I will explain the origins of manga concept.

In 12th-century Japan, people practised drawing stories on scrolls. That process is known as Ashoju-Giga. In Ashoju Giga they recounted events by using a sequence of images and text. The process to understand the event is to read scroll from one side to another, the modern manga grasped features from this and from the western comics to create the modern manga. 

The modern manga is very cheap and very easy to buy. They are available almost everywhere starting from books stores to restaurants. However, the same can't be said about Ashoju Giga. The scrolls are very hard to produce in mass amounts since they cost a lot of money and because of that only the wealthy were able to get them. 

During the Edo period, a new technique came into practice which helped to reproduce the same image multiple times, this technique is known as Ukiyo-E.  In 1814 an artist known as Hokusai used Ukiyo-E and published a book of sketches called Hokusai Manga. That was the first time the word manga is used for a series of sketches and text.  Several artists did something similar but Hokusai is the only one to use the word manga.  Most Ukiyo-E artists at that time were interested in Shunga. Shunga drawings are erotic drawings which are related to present time lewd manga known as Hentai. 

When Hokusai invented that word he never would have thought that manga would be an international synonym to describe Japanese comics. The word manga is written like this 漫画 the first character means rambling and second character means drawings. Hokusai's word is later used by different artists who drew sequences of images connected to each other and had very expressive faces. They drew manga as comic strips in the newspaper and they looked very similar to western comics. They weren't similar to present-day manga until Ozuma Tezuka also known as the god of manga created Astro boy.