What is the origin of manga? The answer depends on how you define "manga." The word itself was popularized by the famous woodblock print artist Hokusai, but, contrary to a popular myth, it was not invented by him. The word is composed of two Chinese characters—the first meaning "in spite of oneself" or "lax" and the second meaning "picture"—and has been used to describe various comical images for at least two centuries.

A millennium before Hokusai applied the term to a collection of his less serious works, there were "cartoonish" drawings to be found in Japan, but whether or not pictures drawn in such a style constitute manga is a tricky question. The picture becomes clearer when we limit our discussion to works that fit American cartoonist Will Eisner's definition of comics as "sequential art." The first clear examples of such sequential art are the picture scrolls of medieval Japan, which combine pictures and text to tell stories or describe events. These scrolls look and work like modern manga or comics in many ways, but there is a crucial difference: whereas modern-day manga are produced for mass consumption, picture scrolls were singular works of art produced for an elite audience.

It was in late eighteenth-century Japan, when a growing middle class of urban merchants had developed a vibrant consumer culture, that a manga-like medium produced for popular consumption first appeared. Printed in book form using woodblock technology, kibyôshi ("yellow covers") were storybooks for adults in which narration and dialogue were placed in and around ink-brush illustrations, often in creative ways that consciously blurred the distinction between text and picture. (Multi-volume kibyôshi were known as gôkan.) Like modern-day manga, they dealt with a variety of subjects, including humor, drama, fantasy, and even pornography. By the mid nineteenth century, both kibyôshi and gôkan had disappeared, victims of both government censorship and the convenience and speed of moveable-type technology. Although there are certain startling resemblances , kibyôshi are not the direct ancestors of modern manga.

The ancestor of the modern manga, believe it or not, is the European/American-style political cartoon of the latter 19th Century, and the multi-panel comic strips that flowered in American newspapers in the last years of the 19th Century and the first years of the 20th Century.

Some suggest that the Japanese have a historically-rooted affinity for such visual media as manga, but for the first half of the twentieth century, American comics were more popular and diverse than were Japanese manga. So why have manga flourished while American comics have floundered?

Perhaps the single most important factor in the creation of the modern manga industry was the work of one artist, the late Osamu Tezuka, known in Japan as the "god of manga." Tezuka's most popular creation, Mighty Atom, is known throughout the world; an animated version was broadcast in the U.S. in the 1960's under the name "Astro Boy." In his autobiography, Tezuka described what made his manga different from those that came before him:

After drawing several four-panel comic strips for newspapers immediately following the war, Tezuka made his comic book debut in 1947 with a story entitled New Treasure Island, which was published as an akahon, or "red book," a cheap form of comic book named for the gaudy red ink used on the covers. At the time, akahon were a small niche industry providing children with one of the few entertainment media they could afford in the crushing poverty of early postwar Japan. New Treasure Island changed the scene overnight, selling an unprecedented 400,000 copies.

Publishers responded immediately and enthusiastically, and had no trouble finding young artists eager to emulate Tezuka's revolutionary style. Tezuka moved to a rundown apartment building in Tokyo to be closer to the publishing industry, and quickly developed a following of budding manga artists, some of whom actually moved into the same apartment building. Most of these artists--Shohtaroh Ishimori (later Ishinomori), Fujiko Fujio, Fujio Akatsuka, Hideko Mizuno--went on to become giants of the postwar manga industry.

Tezuka's innovations led to a broadening of the manga market and had a consequence that would inevitably force a radical restructuring of the market: the children who were raised on the manga of Tezuka and his followers, unlike their predecessors, didn't stop reading manga when they got to middle school. Or high school. Or college.

It is important to note, though, that Tezuka was able to exert so much influence because he happened to be in the right place at the right time. Some prewar cartoonists, such as Noboru Oh-shiro, were using many of the "cinematic techniques" said to be invented by Tezuka when Tezuka was a still a child, and were also more technically skilled than Tezuka. But they were confined by the standards of Tokyo publishers (who felt that manga for children should be entertaining and educational, but not too "stimulating") and also by government censors, who allowed only pro-war propaganda to see the light of day for the decade preceding the end of the World War II. "Red Books" were the ideal forum for Tezuka's lengthy, "theme driven" manga, because there was minimal editorial oversight (they were not so much "publishers" as producers of nick-knacks for children made from recycled paper), they contained plenty of pages, and they were popular because the strict rationing of higher quality paper kept the price of "respectable" Tokyo children's publications prohibitively high. Thus, a complex array of factors--cultural, political, economical, and historical--fell neatly into place, allowing Tezuka to catapult to unprecedented prominence.