Manga
Japanese comics and their graphic language, from early sketchbooks and postwar story manga to contemporary art that borrows the look.
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About
The word manga, roughly 'free sketches', was attached to Katsushika Hokusai's printed sketchbooks, the Hokusai Manga (from 1814), and the habit of telling stories in sequential drawings reaches back to the playful animal scrolls known as Chōjū-giga (12th–13th century). Modern manga took shape after 1945. Osamu Tezuka's New Treasure Island (1947) borrowed the cuts and close-ups of film, and his Astro Boy, serialised from 1952 to 1968, fixed the rounded figures and oversized eyes that became a common look.
On the page, look for right-to-left reading, speed lines, dotted screentone and panels that stretch a single glance over several frames. Titles are grouped by readership, from shōnen adventure to shōjo romance, a field that women artists reshaped in the 1970s. Since the 1990s painters and sculptors have lifted this vocabulary into fine art: Takashi Murakami folded it into his Superflat idea, and Yoshitomo Nara's wary children show a clear debt.
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