100-406: Shōnen manga ( 少年漫画 , lit. "boys' comics ", also romanized as shonen , shounen or syônen ) is an editorial category of Japanese comics targeting an audience of adolescent boys. It is, along with shōjo manga (targeting adolescent girls and young women), seinen manga (targeting young adult and adult men), and josei manga (targeting adult women), one of
200-413: A shōnen protagonist often also faces internal conflicts, typically focused around maturity and growing older. In contrast to shōjo manga, which often focuses on the thoughts and interior monologue of the hero, shōnen typically advances plot through dialogue and action. Happy endings are common in shōnen manga, but are not obligatory, with writers expressing the happy ending fitting for
300-513: A mass medium in the early 20th century with the advent of newspaper comic strips; magazine-style comic books followed in the 1930s, the superhero genre became prominent after Superman appeared in 1938. Histories of Japanese comics and cartooning ( manga ) propose origins as early as the 12th century. Japanese comics are generally held separate from the evolution of Euro-American comics, and Western comic art probably originated in 17th-century Italy. Modern Japanese comic strips emerged in
400-427: A singular noun when it refers to the medium itself (e.g. " Comics is a visual art form."), but becomes plural when referring to works collectively (e.g. " Comics are popular reading material."). The comics may be further adapted to animations (anime), dramas, TV shows, movies. The European, American, and Japanese comics traditions have followed different paths. Europeans have seen their tradition as beginning with
500-404: A category of manga aimed at an older male audience in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and many shōnen artists associated with the realist gekiga movement migrated to seinen manga. The demise of the kashi-hon (rental manga) market led many kashi-hon artists to move into magazine publishing, including shōnen manga, bringing their distinct themes and style with them. As
600-560: A combined circulation of over 2 million copies by the 1950s. Their characters, including " Dennis the Menace ", " Desperate Dan " and " The Bash Street Kids " have been read by generations of British children. The comics originally experimented with superheroes and action stories before settling on humorous strips featuring a mix of the Amalgamated Press and US comic book styles. The popularity of superhero comic books declined in
700-479: A defining factor, which can imply the exclusion of even photographic comics. The term manga is used in Japanese to indicate all forms of comics, cartooning, and caricature. The term comics refers to the comics medium when used as an uncountable noun and thus takes the singular: "comics is a medium" rather than "comics are a medium". When comic appears as a countable noun it refers to instances of
800-497: A dozen stories; they are later compiled in tankōbon -format books. At the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, nearly a quarter of all printed material in Japan was comics. Translations became extremely popular in foreign markets—in some cases equaling or surpassing the sales of domestic comics. Comic strips are generally short, multipanel comics that have, since the early 20th century, most commonly appeared in newspapers. In
900-406: A general sense and was used by the Japanese publishing industry until the end of the 19th century to designate publications aimed at children and young people. The word shifted to its current usage of referring specifically to media aimed at adolescent boys, beginning with the practice of segmenting periodicals (especially manga magazines) by sex and age-specific target groups, which was established at
1000-603: A larger page size than used in many other cultures. In English-speaking countries, the trade paperback format originating from collected comic books have also been chosen for original material. Otherwise, bound volumes of comics are called graphic novels and are available in various formats. Despite incorporating the term "novel"—a term normally associated with fiction—"graphic novel" also refers to non-fiction and collections of short works. Japanese comics are collected in volumes called tankōbon following magazine serialization. Gag and editorial cartoons usually consist of
1100-422: A literal form in the form of henshin ( 変身 , lit. 'transformation') , where the hero is able to switch between two personas with different appearances and personalities; examples of this device include Yu-Gi-Oh by Kazuki Takahashi and Samurai Deeper Kyo by Akimine Kamijyo . Transformation abilities are often linked with bonds to a spirit, monster or robot. A major narrative device in shōnen manga
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#17327901220331200-399: A major manga series in a given magazine, for example, advertisements for a video game adaptation of the series or articles about an animated film adaptation of the series. Children's magazines with sex-segregated readerships have existed in Japan since the early 1900s. While early youth magazines were ostensibly unisex – Shōnen Sekai was the first youth magazine in Japan in 1895, targeting
1300-499: A manner that is attractive to the male target audience as so-called bishōjos (literally "beautiful young girls"). They exist as objects of romantic or sexual desire not merely for the male characters, but also for the ostensibly heterosexual male reader as a form of fan service . While these objectifying tropes have persisted in shōnen manga, women have also developed more active roles in these fan service-oriented stories. A common romantic comedy trope in shōnen manga since
1400-400: A medium defined by one-off comic strips. Science fiction stories about robots, space travel, and heroic space-faring adventures enjoyed popularity during this period; many sci-fi stories took themes and concepts from war comics and re-imagined them with pacifist ideals, such as Tetsujin 28-go by Mitsuteru Yokoyama . One of the first new shōnen manga magazines of the post-war period
1500-622: A narrator, convey characters' dialogue or thoughts, or indicate place or time. Speech balloons themselves are strongly associated with comics, such that the addition of one to an image is sufficient to turn the image into comics. Sound effects mimic non-vocal sounds textually using onomatopoeia sound-words. Cartooning is most frequently used in making comics, traditionally using ink (especially India ink ) with dip pens or ink brushes; mixed media and digital technology have become common. Cartooning techniques such as motion lines and abstract symbols are often employed. While comics are often
1600-404: A notable example of the latter. Samurai appeared frequently as idealized role models for boy readers in early shōnen , analogous to representations of cowboys in western comics; samurai stories shifted to comedy and sportsmanship in the post-war period, before returning to themes of idealized themes of good versus evil. Though shōnen manga typically attempts to convey a message of peace,
1700-788: A prolific body of work. Towards the close of the 20th century, these three traditions converged in a trend towards book-length comics: the comic album in Europe, the tankōbon in Japan, and the graphic novel in the English-speaking countries. Outside of these genealogies, comics theorists and historians have seen precedents for comics in the Lascaux cave paintings in France (some of which appear to be chronological sequences of images), Egyptian hieroglyphs , Trajan's Column in Rome,
1800-596: A public backlash, it did not lead to the decline for the industry: series with anarchic, offensive humor became popular in shōnen and seinen manga alike, with Crayon Shin-Chan by Yoshito Usui becoming an internationally famous example of this phenomenon. Manga artist Go Nagai originated the sexually-charged ecchi genre with Harenchi Gakuen , which was serialized in Weekly Shōnen Jump . The stylistic and thematic differences between shōnen and shōjo began to narrow considerably beginning in
1900-425: A readership of both boys and girls – in practice, the editorial content of these publications largely concerned topics that were thought to be of interest to boys. This provoked the emergence of first exclusively shōjo (girls) magazines in 1902, and shōnen magazines subsequently began to exclusively target a male audience. Initially, these magazines did not publish manga; the first shōnen magazine to do so
2000-430: A result, shōnen manga came to deal with more serious and political themes, and saw an increase in depictions of violent and explicit subjects, as well as an increase in profanity. Significant artists of this era include Shigeru Mizuki , creator of the horror series GeGeGe no Kitarō ; and George Akiyama , whose shōnen manga series Ashura depicts cannibalism, child abuse, and mass murder. Although this provoked
2100-618: A significant number of genres and subgenres within shōnen manga, especially when compared to other comic cultures outside of Japan. This includes but is not limited to comedy , crime , romance , slice of life , and stories about activities such as sports and the lives of different types of working professionals. The action genre is itself is expressed through a variety of subgenres, from historical and contemporary drama to science fiction and fantasy . Shōnen war fiction has been alternately jingoistic or critical of militarism and violence, with Barefoot Gen by Keiji Nakazawa as
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#17327901220332200-495: A significant proportion of the series' audience; this is especially true of series featuring male characters who are bishōnen (literally "beautiful boys"), or who are perceived as such by readers. This reading of shōnen manga is expressed in the form of fan works such as dōjinshi (self-published amateur manga) and the boys' love (BL) genre of manga and anime, which includes both original and derivative works . Manga scholar Yukari Fujimoto notes in her analysis of
2300-536: A similarly confusing history since they are most often not humorous and are periodicals, not regular books. It is common in English to refer to the comics of different cultures by the terms used in their languages, such as manga for Japanese comics, or bandes dessinées for French-language Franco-Belgian comics . Many cultures have taken their word for comics from English, including Russian ( комикс , komiks ) and German ( Comic ). Similarly,
2400-439: A single panel, often incorporating a caption or speech balloon. Definitions of comics which emphasize sequence usually exclude gag, editorial, and other single-panel cartoons; they can be included in definitions that emphasize the combination of word and image. Gag cartoons first began to proliferate in broadsheets published in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the term "cartoon" was first used to describe them in 1843 in
2500-406: A way that one could read the 6-panel comic, flip the book and keep reading. He made 64 such comics in total. In 2012, a remake of a selection of the comics was made by Marcus Ivarsson in the book 'In Uppåner med Lilla Lisen & Gamle Muppen'. ( ISBN 978-91-7089-524-1 ) Shorter, black-and-white daily strips began to appear early in the 20th century, and became established in newspapers after
2600-513: Is no consensus among theorists and historians on a definition of comics ; some emphasize the combination of images and text, some sequentiality or other image relations, and others historical aspects such as mass reproduction or the use of recurring characters. Cartooning and other forms of illustration are the most common means of image-making in comics. Photo comics is a form that uses photographic images. Common forms include comic strips , editorial and gag cartoons , and comic books . Since
2700-415: Is primarily on action , adventure , and the fighting of monsters or other forces of evil. Action stories are so dominant in shōnen manga that some manga and non-manga works are occasionally designated as shōnen not because of their ostensible target group, but because of their content focus on action and adventure. Though action narratives dominate the category, there is deep editorial diversity and
2800-437: Is rivalry between the protagonist and his opponent, with a fight or a quest often appearing as a central element; Dragon Ball is among the most popular and commercially successful examples of this archetypal story. Typically, a shōnen protagonist is an outsider, or in some way disadvantaged compared to others, but who through training, perseverance, and willpower eventually succeeds against all odds. Plots typically follow
2900-411: Is the incorporation of verbal content". Aaron Meskin saw McCloud's theories as an artificial attempt to legitimize the place of comics in art history. Cross-cultural study of comics is complicated by the great difference in meaning and scope of the words for "comics" in different languages. The French term for comics, bandes dessinées ("drawn strip") emphasizes the juxtaposition of drawn images as
3000-447: Is the most popular category in the Japanese market of the four primary demographic categories of manga ( shōnen , shōjo , seinen , and josei ). The actual readership of shōnen manga, as is the case for all demographic categories of manga, extends significantly beyond this adolescent male target group to include all ages and genders. For example, a 2006 survey of female manga readers found that Weekly Shōnen Jump
3100-403: Is to depict the contours of figures with rough, coarse motion lines to give the appearance of movement. Historically, the protagonists of shōnen manga were almost exclusively men and boys; women and girls appeared primarily in supporting roles as sisters, mothers, or girlfriends, if at all. This was especially true of ecchi stories that developed out of shōnen manga beginning in
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3200-614: The New York World and later the New York American , particularly Outcault's The Yellow Kid , led to the development of newspaper comic strips. Early Sunday strips were full-page and often in colour. Between 1896 and 1901 cartoonists experimented with sequentiality, movement, and speech balloons. An example is Gustave Verbeek , who wrote his comic series "The UpsideDowns of Old Man Muffaroo and Little Lady Lovekins" between 1903 and 1905. These comics were made in such
3300-478: The United States , western Europe (especially France and Belgium ), and Japan . The history of European comics is often traced to Rodolphe Töpffer 's cartoon strips of the 1830s, while Wilhelm Busch and his Max and Moritz also had a global impact from 1865 on, and became popular following the success in the 1930s of strips and books such as The Adventures of Tintin . American comics emerged as
3400-510: The 11th-century Norman Bayeux Tapestry , the 1370 bois Protat woodcut, the 15th-century Ars moriendi and block books , Michelangelo's The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, and William Hogarth 's 18th-century sequential engravings, amongst others. Illustrated humour periodicals were popular in 19th-century Britain, the earliest of which was the short-lived The Glasgow Looking Glass in 1825. The most popular
3500-529: The 1920s and 1930s, with Yōnen Club selling over 950,000 copies. During the Second Sino-Japanese War and Second World War , magazine sales declined and publications were used increasingly for wartime propaganda purposes . The manga content in these publications was reduced, and the series that remained typically focused on patriotic and militaristic themes, such as stories about samurai . In other stories, robots were depicted as fighting in
3600-655: The 1930s, at first reprinting newspaper comic strips; by the end of the decade, original content began to dominate. The success in 1938 of Action Comics and its lead hero Superman marked the beginning of the Golden Age of Comic Books , in which the superhero genre was prominent. In the UK and the Commonwealth , the DC Thomson -created Dandy (1937) and Beano (1938) became successful humor-based titles, with
3700-415: The 1930s. The first manga, Norakuro , was published in the magazine in 1931. The magazine's success lead to the sister-publication of Shōjo Club in 1923 , which offered similar content, but catered for girls. This article about an anime or manga magazine is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . See tips for writing articles about magazines . Further suggestions might be found on
3800-506: The 1970s, with The Abashiri Family by Go Nagai as one of the earliest representative works of this development, as well as an early example of a shōnen manga with a female protagonist. Since the 1980s, women and girls have played a more active role in shōnen manga, fighting alongside male characters and not merely as passive support. Dr. Slump by Akira Toriyama was an early representative work of this development, with its mischievous child protagonist Arale Norimaki being among
3900-513: The 1980s has been to pair a weak male protagonist with a strong female love interest who is not only the target of his romantic and sexual desire, but also his good friend and confidante. In the harem genre, which originated from shōnen manga, a male protagonist is surrounded by several female characters who desire him, and who are often more confident and assertive than he is; examples include Negima! Magister Negi Magi by Ken Akamatsu and Hanaukyo Maid Team by Morishige . In other cases,
4000-521: The 1980s, combat-focused "battle manga" stories became popular, with Dragon Ball and Fist of the North Star emerging as representative works of this development. Manga critic Jason Thompson credits the success of Dragon Ball , first published in 1984, as originating a trend that has persisted to contemporary shōnen manga of favoring cartoonish art styles over the more mature art styles of shōnen titles such as City Hunter and Fist of
4100-481: The 1980s, mainstream sensibilities were reasserted and serialization became less common as the number of comics magazines decreased and many comics began to be published directly as albums. Smaller publishers such as L'Association that published longer works in non-traditional formats by auteur -istic creators also became common. Since the 1990s, mergers resulted in fewer large publishers, while smaller publishers proliferated. Sales overall continued to grow despite
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4200-520: The 1980s, with widespread exchange of stylistic devices and themes. For example, the characteristic large eyes of shōjo manga became common in shōnen manga to convey the emotions of characters, and female characters have enjoyed greater prominence as both supporting and primary characters in shōnen manga. Other graphic storytelling techniques that originated in shōjo manga, such as montages of multiple panels , were imported into shōnen manga and have become common stylistic devices. In
4300-472: The 1990s. Formal theories of manga have focused on developing a "manga expression theory", with emphasis on spatial relationships in the structure of images on the page, distinguishing the medium from film or literature, in which the flow of time is the basic organizing element. Comics studies courses have proliferated at Japanese universities, and Japan Society for Studies in Cartoon and Comics ( ja )
4400-686: The British humour magazine Punch . Webcomics are comics that are available on the internet, first being published the 1980s. They are able to potentially reach large audiences, and new readers can often access archives of previous installments. Webcomics can make use of an infinite canvas , meaning they are not constrained by the size or dimensions of a printed comics page. Some consider storyboards and wordless novels to be comics. Film studios, especially in animation, often use sequences of images as guides for film sequences. These storyboards are not intended as an end product and are rarely seen by
4500-712: The Chinese term manhua and the Korean manhwa derive from the Chinese characters with which the Japanese term manga is written. Academic journals Archives Databases Sh%C5%8Dnen Club Shōnen Club ( Shōnen Kurabu / 少年倶楽部, later 少年クラブ in 1946) was a monthly boys' magazine begun by Kodansha in November 1914. The magazine initially featured articles, poetry and serialized novels, but it began to focus more on creating manga content by
4600-476: The Japanese term for comics and cartooning, manga , in the early 19th century. In the 1930s Harry "A" Chesler started a comics studio, which eventually at its height employed 40 artists working for 50 different publishers who helped make the comics medium flourish in "the Golden Age of Comics" after World War II. In the post-war era modern Japanese comics began to flourish when Osamu Tezuka produced
4700-509: The North Star . Female manga artists also began to enjoy increasing critical and commercial success as shōnen manga creators. As a result of the combined influence of ecchi and the rise of female artists, romance emerged as a subgenre of shōnen manga, especially romantic comedy . When manga began to emerge in the Western world in the early 1990s, the shōnen category was so dominant in these new markets that it came to shape
4800-663: The Swiss Rodolphe Töpffer from as early as 1827 and Americans have seen the origin of theirs in Richard ;F. Outcault 's 1890s newspaper strip The Yellow Kid , though many Americans have come to recognize Töpffer's precedence. Wilhelm Busch directly influenced Rudolph Dirks and his Katzenjammer Kids . Japan has a long history of satirical cartoons and comics leading up to the World War ;II era. The ukiyo-e artist Hokusai popularized
4900-896: The US, daily strips have normally occupied a single tier, while Sunday strips have been given multiple tiers. Since the early 20th century, daily newspaper comic strips have typically been printed in black-and-white and Sunday comics have usually been printed in colour and have often occupied a full newspaper page. Specialized comics periodicals formats vary greatly in different cultures. Comic books , primarily an American format, are thin periodicals usually published in colour. European and Japanese comics are frequently serialized in magazines—monthly or weekly in Europe, and usually black-and-white and weekly in Japan. Japanese comics magazine typically run to hundreds of pages. Book-length comics take different forms in different cultures. European comic albums are most commonly colour volumes printed at A4-size ,
5000-468: The artwork in ink; a colourist ; and a letterer , who adds the captions and speech balloons. The English-language term comics derives from the humorous (or " comic ") work which predominated in early American newspaper comic strips, but usage of the term has become standard for non-humorous works as well. The alternate spelling comix – coined by the underground comix movement – is sometimes used to address such ambiguities. The term "comic book" has
5100-470: The basic structure of the hero's journey , with much of the story focused on the protagonist's training and transformation into a hero, and on characters who earn their status as heroes through effort and tenacity rather than by virtue of birth or assignment. For long-running series, the hero's journey repeats itself; as a new story arc begins, the enemy becomes more powerful and the danger to be overcome becomes greater. In addition to these external conflicts,
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#17327901220335200-415: The beginning of the 20th century and accelerated starting in the 1960s. This segmentation system is now openly used as a categorization system by manga publishers and extends into works that are adapted from manga, such as anime . Shōnen manga refers to manga aimed at an audience of adolescent boys, with the primary target audience alternately defined as 9 to 18 years old and as 12 to 18 years old. It
5300-491: The brain's comprehension of comics is similar to comprehending other domains, such as language and music. Historical narratives of manga tend to focus either on its recent, post-WWII history, or on attempts to demonstrate deep roots in the past, such as to the Chōjū-jinbutsu-giga picture scroll of the 12th and 13th centuries, or the early 19th-century Hokusai Manga . The first historical overview of Japanese comics
5400-419: The category has been criticized by individuals such as director Hayao Miyazaki for promoting overly simple good/evil dichotomies. A shōnen protagonist is often characterized by contradictory qualities: short-tempered and cool, mischievous and rebellious, serious and cynical, clumsy and infallible, or who appears as a good-for-nothing but possesses hidden abilities. In some cases, the contradiction takes on
5500-768: The definition of comics, a medium that has taken various, equally valid forms over its history. Morgan sees comics as a subset of " les littératures dessinées " (or "drawn literatures"). French theory has come to give special attention to the page, in distinction from American theories such as McCloud's which focus on panel-to-panel transitions. In the mid-2000s, Neil Cohn began analyzing how comics are understood using tools from cognitive science, extending beyond theory by using actual psychological and neuroscience experiments. This work has argued that sequential images and page layouts both use separate rule-bound "grammars" to be understood that extend beyond panel-to-panel transitions and categorical distinctions of types of layouts, and that
5600-455: The demography even if it not comes up as a suitable. Comics theorist Neil Cohn regards the art style of shōnen as generally "edgier" than that of shōjo manga, and notes how most regular manga readers are able to easily distinguish between shōnen and shōjo based on visual appearance alone. Visually, a shōnen protagonist often possesses what manga critic Jason Thompson describes as "insanely spiky hair" that distinguishes
5700-400: The early 20th century, and the output of comic magazines and books rapidly expanded in the post-World War II era (1945)– with the popularity of cartoonists such as Osamu Tezuka . Comics has had a lowbrow reputation for much of their history, but towards the end of the 20th century, they began to find greater acceptance with the public and academics. The English term comics is used as
5800-600: The establishment of the Comics Code Authority self-censoring body. The Code has been blamed for stunting the growth of American comics and maintaining its low status in American society for much of the remainder of the century. Superheroes re-established themselves as the most prominent comic book genre by the early 1960s. Underground comix challenged the Code and readers with adult, countercultural content in
5900-421: The female readership of the shōnen titles One Piece , Naruto , and The Prince of Tennis that homoerotic interpretations of shōnen manga tend to be most common among titles that do not include prominent female characters that a female readership is able to identify with. Shōnen manga is traditionally published in dedicated manga magazines that specifically target an audience of shōnen . At
6000-423: The first shōnen manga to depict this type of archetypal character as a girl rather than a boy. The 1980s also saw female shōnen manga artists rise to greater prominence: notably horror manga artist Kei Kusunoki , and Rumiko Takahashi with her romantic comedies Urusei Yatsura and Ranma ½ . Especially in shōnen series that are aimed at an older audience, female characters are often presented in
6100-415: The first manga series in the genre, and Ashita no Joe by Asao Takamori and Tetsuya Chiba , which became one of the most commercially successful works in the genre. 1959 saw the launch of Shōnen Sunday and Weekly Shōnen Magazine , the first weekly shōnen manga magazines. Other weeklies, such as Shōnen Champion , Shōnen King , and Shōnen Ace , emerged in the 1960s. Weekly Shōnen Jump
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#17327901220336200-527: The first modern Japanese comic strip. By the 1930s, comic strips were serialized in large-circulation monthly girls' and boys' magazine and collected into hardback volumes. The modern era of comics in Japan began after World War II, propelled by the success of the serialized comics of the prolific Osamu Tezuka and the comic strip Sazae-san . Genres and audiences diversified over the following decades. Stories are usually first serialized in magazines which are often hundreds of pages thick and may contain over
6300-524: The image of manga as a whole. While shōjo made gains in popularity by the 2000s, shōnen remains the most popular category of manga, both in Japan and internationally. This thematic orientation of shōnen manga is readily inferred from the formal values or slogans that shōnen manga magazines assign themselves: for example, "friendship, perseverance, and victory" for Weekly Shōnen Jump , and "courage, friendship and fighting spirit" for CoroCoro Comic . The editorial focus of shōnen manga
6400-571: The industry's peak in the mid-1990s, there were 23 total shōnen magazines, which collectively sold 662 million copies in 1995. The total manga magazine market that year included 265 magazines, with a total of 1.595 billion copies sold. A manga magazine is typically several hundred pages long, and contains over a dozen series or one-shots. The largest Japanese shōnen magazines in terms of circulation are Weekly Shōnen Jump by Shueisha , Weekly Shōnen Magazine by Kodansha , and Weekly Shōnen Sunday by Shogakukan ; these publishers are also
6500-472: The largest publishers of manga generally. The fourth largest magazine, albeit by a significant margin, is Weekly Shōnen Champion by Akita Shoten , which was among the most popular manga magazines in the 1970s and 1980s. The magazines CoroCoro Comic and the now-defunct Comic BomBom technically belong to the kodomo (children's manga) demographic, but are often counted as shōnen magazines as they target an audience of school-aged boys. A list of
6600-437: The late 1960s and early 1970s. The underground gave birth to the alternative comics movement in the 1980s and its mature, often experimental content in non-superhero genres. Comics in the US has had a lowbrow reputation stemming from its roots in mass culture ; cultural elites sometimes saw popular culture as threatening culture and society. In the latter half of the 20th century, popular culture won greater acceptance, and
6700-522: The late 19th century. New publications in both the Western and Japanese styles became popular, and at the end of the 1890s, American-style newspaper comics supplements began to appear in Japan, as well as some American comic strips. 1900 saw the debut of the Jiji Manga in the Jiji Shinpō newspaper—the first use of the word "manga" in its modern sense, and where, in 1902, Rakuten Kitazawa began
6800-412: The late 20th century, bound volumes such as graphic novels , comic albums , and tankōbon have become increasingly common, along with webcomics as well as scientific/medical comics. The history of comics has followed different paths in different cultures. Scholars have posited a pre-history as far back as the Lascaux cave paintings. By the mid-20th century, comics flourished, particularly in
6900-462: The lines between high and low culture began to blur. Comics nevertheless continued to be stigmatized, as the medium was seen as entertainment for children and illiterates. The graphic novel —book-length comics—began to gain attention after Will Eisner popularized the term with his book A Contract with God (1978). The term became widely known with the public after the commercial success of Maus , Watchmen , and The Dark Knight Returns in
7000-412: The male protagonist is unsuccessful in his attempts to woo the female character, or the story is focused around the originally naïve and infantile male protagonist maturing and learning how to develop healthy relationships with women. For certain shōnen series, a female readership who read in or interpret subtextual homoerotic relationships between canonically heterosexual male characters constitute
7100-516: The medium, such as individual comic strips or comic books: "Tom's comics are in the basement." Panels are individual images containing a segment of action, often surrounded by a border. Prime moments in a narrative are broken down into panels via a process called encapsulation. The reader puts the pieces together via the process of closure by using background knowledge and an understanding of panel relations to combine panels mentally into events. The size, shape, and arrangement of panels each affect
7200-457: The mid-1980s. In the 21st century graphic novels became established in mainstream bookstores and libraries and webcomics became common. The francophone Swiss Rodolphe Töpffer produced comic strips beginning in 1827, and published theories behind the form. Wilhelm Busch first published his Max and Moritz in 1865. Cartoons appeared widely in newspapers and magazines from the 19th century. The success of Zig et Puce in 1925 popularized
7300-440: The primacy of sequences of images. Towards the close of the 20th century, different cultures' discoveries of each other's comics traditions, the rediscovery of forgotten early comics forms, and the rise of new forms made defining comics a more complicated task. European comics studies began with Töpffer's theories of his own work in the 1840s, which emphasized panel transitions and the visual–verbal combination. No further progress
7400-533: The primary editorial categories of manga. Shōnen manga is traditionally published in dedicated manga magazines that exclusively target the shōnen demographic group. Of the four primary demographic categories of manga, shōnen is the most popular category in the Japanese market. While shōnen manga ostensibly targets an audience of young males, its actual readership extends significantly beyond this target group to include all ages and genders. The category originated from Japanese children's magazines at
7500-524: The primary outlet for comics in the mid-20th century. As in the US, at the time comics were seen as infantile and a threat to culture and literacy; commentators stated that "none bear up to the slightest serious analysis", and that comics were "the sabotage of all art and all literature". In the 1960s, the term bandes dessinées ("drawn strips") came into wide use in French to denote the medium. Cartoonists began creating comics for mature audiences, and
7600-562: The problems of defining literature and film, no consensus has been reached on a definition of the comics medium, and attempted definitions and descriptions have fallen prey to numerous exceptions. Theorists such as Töpffer, R. C. Harvey , Will Eisner , David Carrier, Alain Rey, and Lawrence Grove emphasize the combination of text and images, though there are prominent examples of pantomime comics throughout its history. Other critics, such as Thierry Groensteen and Scott McCloud, have emphasized
7700-411: The protagonist's silhouette from that of other characters. The eyes of shōnen characters in the post-war period are significantly smaller than those of characters in shōjo manga ; large eyes are used in shōjo manga to better convey the emotions of the characters, an aspect which has historically been given less focus in shōnen manga. A common visual device in shōnen action scenes
7800-403: The public. Wordless novels are books which use sequences of captionless images to deliver a narrative. "Comics ... are sometimes four-legged and sometimes two-legged and sometimes fly and sometimes don't ... to employ a metaphor as mixed as the medium itself, defining comics entails cutting a Gordian-knotted enigma wrapped in a mystery ..." R. C. Harvey , 2001 Similar to
7900-625: The satirical and taboo-breaking Hara-Kiri defied censorship laws in the countercultural spirit that led to the May 1968 events . Frustration with censorship and editorial interference led to a group of Pilote cartoonists to found the adults-only L'Écho des savanes in 1972. Adult-oriented and experimental comics flourished in the 1970s, such as in the experimental science fiction of Mœbius and others in Métal hurlant , even mainstream publishers took to publishing prestige-format adult comics . From
8000-562: The study of comics. David Carrier's The Aesthetics of Comics (2000) was the first full-length treatment of comics from a philosophical perspective. Prominent American attempts at definitions of comics include Eisner's, McCloud's, and Harvey's. Eisner described what he called " sequential art " as "the arrangement of pictures or images and words to narrate a story or dramatize an idea"; Scott McCloud defined comics as "juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in
8100-496: The success in 1907 of Bud Fisher 's Mutt and Jeff . In Britain, the Amalgamated Press established a popular style of a sequence of images with text beneath them, including Illustrated Chips and Comic Cuts . Humour strips predominated at first, and in the 1920s and 1930s strips with continuing stories in genres such as adventure and drama also became popular. Thin periodicals called comic books appeared in
8200-399: The term "Ninth Art" was coined, as comics began to attract public and academic attention as an artform. A group including René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo founded the magazine Pilote in 1959 to give artists greater freedom over their work. Goscinny and Uderzo's The Adventures of Asterix appeared in it and went on to become the best-selling French-language comics series. From 1960,
8300-428: The timing and pacing of the narrative. The contents of a panel may be asynchronous, with events depicted in the same image not necessarily occurring at the same time. Text is frequently incorporated into comics via speech balloons , captions, and sound effects. Speech balloons indicate dialogue (or thought, in the case of thought balloons ), with tails pointing at their respective speakers. Captions can give voice to
8400-421: The top shōnen magazines by circulation as of 2015 are listed below: Comics Comics are a medium used to express ideas with images, often combined with text or other visual information. It typically takes the form of a sequence of panels of images. Textual devices such as speech balloons , captions , and onomatopoeia can indicate dialogue, narration, sound effects, or other information. There
8500-600: The trend towards a shrinking print market. Japanese comics and cartooning ( manga ), have a history that has been seen as far back as the anthropomorphic characters in the 12th-to-13th-century Chōjū-jinbutsu-giga , 17th-century toba-e and kibyōshi picture books, and woodblock prints such as ukiyo-e which were popular between the 17th and 20th centuries. The kibyōshi contained examples of sequential images, movement lines, and sound effects. Illustrated magazines for Western expatriates introduced Western-style satirical cartoons to Japan in
8600-629: The turn of the 20th century and gained significant popularity by the 1920s. The editorial focus of shōnen manga is primarily on action , adventure , and the fighting of monsters or other forces of evil. Though action narratives dominate the category, there is deep editorial diversity and a significant number of genres and subgenres within shōnen manga, especially compared to other comic cultures outside of Japan, including comedy , crime , romance , slice of life , and sports . The Japanese word shōnen ( 少年 , /ɕoːnen/ lit. "few years") , meaning "young boy", historically referred to juveniles in
8700-465: The use of manga for pro-Imperial propaganda. Manga developed during this period under the influence of artist Osamu Tezuka , with series such as Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion . Tezuka was inspired by American cartoons , and pioneered the so-called "story manga": long-running manga series with a cinematic style and continuity across multiple chapters, contrasting what had previously been
8800-534: The use of speech balloons in European comics, after which Franco-Belgian comics began to dominate. The Adventures of Tintin , with its signature clear line style, was first serialized in newspaper comics supplements beginning in 1929, and became an icon of Franco-Belgian comics. Following the success of Le Journal de Mickey (est. 1934), dedicated comics magazines like Spirou (est. 1938) and Tintin (1946–1993), and full-colour comic albums became
8900-539: The viewer", a strictly formal definition which detached comics from its historical and cultural trappings. R. C. Harvey defined comics as "pictorial narratives or expositions in which words (often lettered into the picture area within speech balloons) usually contribute to the meaning of the pictures and vice versa". Each definition has had its detractors. Harvey saw McCloud's definition as excluding single-panel cartoons, and objected to McCloud's de-emphasizing verbal elements, insisting "the essential characteristic of comics
9000-510: The war against the Allied forces, as analogous to western superhero comics that depicted superheroes fighting the Axis powers during this same period. During the post-war occupation of Japan , the Japanese publishing industry was rebuilt under initially strict guidelines. Stories focused on war, combat, and most competitive sports were banned with the aim of discouraging belligerence and hindering
9100-424: The work of a single creator, the labour of making them is frequently divided between a number of specialists. There may be separate writers and artists , and artists may specialize in parts of the artwork such as characters or backgrounds, as is common in Japan. Particularly in American superhero comic books, the art may be divided between a penciller , who lays out the artwork in pencil; an inker , who finishes
9200-451: The years following World War II, while comic book sales continued to increase as other genres proliferated, such as romance , westerns , crime , horror , and humour. Following a sales peak in the early 1950s, the content of comic books (particularly crime and horror) was subjected to scrutiny from parent groups and government agencies, which culminated in Senate hearings that led to
9300-587: Was Manga Shōnen , which launched in 1947 and published works by Tezuka, Leiji Matsumoto , and Shōtarō Ishinomori . As post-war censorship codes were repealed and Japan entered a period of significant economic development in the 1950s, sales of manga and the number of manga magazines increased significantly, and shōnen and shōjo manga came to further establish themselves as distinct categories. The first works of sports manga also emerged from shōnen manga during this time; notable early works include Igaguri-kun [ jp ] by Eiichi Fukui as
9400-437: Was Punch , which popularized the term cartoon for its humorous caricatures. On occasion the cartoons in these magazines appeared in sequences; the character Ally Sloper featured in the earliest serialized comic strip when the character began to feature in its own weekly magazine in 1884. American comics developed out of such magazines as Puck , Judge , and Life . The success of illustrated humour supplements in
9500-468: Was Shōnen Pakku , first published in 1907. This was followed by Shōnen Club in 1914 and later Yōnen Club . Among the most successful and influential manga series in these early shōnen magazines were Norakuro by Suihō Tagawa , which follows the life of an anthropomorphic dog soldier, and Tank Tankuro by Gajo Sakamoto , about a robot-like character who can change his appearance. Shōnen magazine enjoyed significant popularity during
9600-418: Was Seiki Hosokibara's Nihon Manga-Shi in 1924. Early post-war Japanese criticism was mostly of a left-wing political nature until the 1986 publication of Tomofusa Kure's Modern Manga: The Complete Picture , which de-emphasized politics in favour of formal aspects, such as structure and a "grammar" of comics. The field of manga studies increased rapidly, with numerous books on the subject appearing in
9700-521: Was established in 2001 to promote comics scholarship. The publication of Frederik L. Schodt 's Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics in 1983 led to the spread of use of the word manga outside Japan to mean "Japanese comics" or "Japanese-style comics". Coulton Waugh attempted the first comprehensive history of American comics with The Comics (1947). Will Eisner's Comics and Sequential Art (1985) and Scott McCloud 's Understanding Comics (1993) were early attempts in English to formalize
9800-486: Was first published in 1968, and would establish itself as the best-selling manga magazine across demographic categories, a position it holds to this day. Many of the most popular and commercially successful shōnen series originated in Weekly Shōnen Jump , including Dragon Ball by Akira Toriyama , Naruto by Masashi Kishimoto , Bleach by Tite Kubo , One Piece by Eiichiro Oda , and Slam Dunk by Takehiko Inoue . Seinen manga became formalized as
9900-570: Was made until the 1970s. Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle then took a semiotics approach to the study of comics, analyzing text–image relations, page-level image relations, and image discontinuities, or what Scott McCloud later dubbed "closure". In 1987, Henri Vanlier introduced the term multicadre , or "multiframe", to refer to the comics page as a semantic unit. By the 1990s, theorists such as Benoît Peeters and Thierry Groensteen turned attention to artists' poïetic creative choices. Thierry Smolderen and Harry Morgan have held relativistic views of
10000-416: Was the most popular manga magazine among this demographic, placing ahead of magazines that specifically target a female readership. The target group orientation of shōnen manga is particularly evident in the non-manga content of shōnen manga magazines, which include advertising and articles on topics tailored to the interests of young males, such as video games . Non-manga content often corresponds to
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