THE BOOKWORM
In November 2019, “My Hero Academia” hit the number 3 spot of the “New York Times”. It was the first time a manga series cracked the top three. In the years since, manga has continued to be represented on the New York Times Best Sellers Graphic Books and Manga list and has only grown in popularity. So, what is manga? Manga, simply stated, is the Japanese word for comic books. The word is composed of two parts: “man” (pronounced “mon”) meaning whimsical, impromptu, rambling or aimless and “ga” (pronounced “guh”) meaning pictures.
The earliest form of manga can be found in the 12th century on scrolls created by Japanese Buddhist monks depicting animals behaving like humans. In the late 19th century, the term manga was popularized by Rakuten Kitazawa, an early cartoonist, and one of the founding fathers of manga comics. His humorous newspaper, “Jiji Manga”, or “Topical Manga”, was a Sunday supplement to the Japanese publication “News of Current Affairs”, and modeled after the Sunday comics section of US newspapers. After World War 2, Tezjka Osaku further popularized the manga style with titles such as “New Treasure Island”, “Astroboy”, and “Black Jack” earning him distinction as the “Father of Manga” and the “Walt Disney of Japan”. Today, the popular genre has grown to include comics and graphic novels originating outside of Japan but influenced by the Japanese style of comics. Unlike western comics, manga is typically printed in black-and-white, read from right-to-left, and what western audiences would perceive as from back-to-front. Manga is released regularly as monthly orweeklychapters. Ifatitleis popular, the publisher may collect and publish a series of those chapters into volumes called tankōbon.
