Japanese Comic Books, also known as Manga (jap. 漫画) have gained worldwide popularity over the past years and quickly became one of the main things representing Japanese Culture for people around the world.

Dating all the way back to twelfth and thirteenth century’s scrolls with exaggerated sketches of everyday life, to the first publishing of Weekly Shonen Jump in 1968, to modern publications, Japanese comic books and graphic novels have made a huge impact on the readers, creating a demand for new works (Juliov and Duplessis, 2022). This demand gave japanese artists new jobs and ways to make a living. With weekly or monthly chapter releases, manga publishing agencies definitely keep manga artists, or mangakas, busy.

Manga comes in a huge variety of genres, so everyone would be able to find what they like and possibly discover new genres they didn’t even know about. From adventure packed Shonen to Romance, Horror, Slice of life, Sports and Nonfiction, manga has it all (Pagan, 2021).

Manga as we know it now began developing during American occupation of Japan after World War II, when Japanese people got exposed to Western culture (Juliov and Duplessis, 2022). One of the first modern mangakas was Osamu Tezuka (1928 - 1989), also known as “the father of manga”, who created the hit manga, and later, anime-series “Astro Boy”, which has greatly influenced the path in which manga started developing as an artform later on (Roth, 2019).

Talking about the most famous manga artists of our time we have to mention Hiromu Arakawa with her manga series “Fullmetal Alchemist”; Akira Toriyama, the creator of “Dragon Ball’; Eichiro Oda, who created “One Piece”; Junji Ito and his collection of terrifying horror stories; Kentaro Miura with his “Berserk”; Takeshita Obata - “Death Note”; Hajime Isayama - “Attack on Titan” and many many more (Luciam, s.d.).






*The japanese word 漫画 (manga) consists of two kanji meaning informal ( 漫 man) and drawing (画 ga) (Juliov and Duplessis, 2022)