Satirical painting and humorous genre paintings can be traced back as far as the twelfth century in Japan. The early nineteenth-century artist Hokusai was particularly skilled in producing this kind of work. With the establishment of a modern state in 1868, Japan also saw the development of a modern mass media including newspapers and magazines containing manga. But the most significant advance in the art form came after the end of World War II. Thus the manga that we know today are really post-war manga. They have a history of half a century.

Contemporary manga traces its origins to a single genius - that of Osamu Tezuka. In 1947 Tezuka took Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island as the inspiration for a manga version entitled New Treasure Island published in book form. Despite the miserable economic conditions of the immediate postwar and the decimation of the publishing industry, this work became an immediate bestseller, selling 400,000 copies. At the time Tezuka was a nineteen-year-old medical student. New Treasure Island contained the germs of a new syntax for manga and had an enormous impact on a new generation of manga artists. Tezuka himself continued to produce manga until his death in 1989, authoring such popular works as Astro Boy.

The decade following the war saw the emergence of a great number of manga artists in addition to Tezuka, bringing about a veritable manga boom. Nonetheless, manga were still identified as a genre for children. But those who grew up reading manga were not able to kick the habit after reaching adulthood. This was the postwar generation, the manga generation. In their estimation of manga, the members of this generation came to experience a virtually irreparable rift with their elders.

By the late 1960s the manga generation had become university students and contemporary manga met with a crucial turning point. It was at this time that one began to see manga which met the demands of university students for entertainment and art. The rising student movement enthusiastically embraced this newly emergent media and in the process, Japanese contemporary manga came into its own.

Around 1980 manga techniques began to show an even greater degree of refinement and manga magazines acquired the breadth and diversity they still maintain today. Today's manga have emerged as a virtually omnipotent visual media, encompassing forms of entertainment from joke-books to melodrama to sci-fi, literary works from novels to travelogues, and manuals for educational and didactic purposes. As such, they have come to be enjoyed by people in all walks of life.

..manga and its number one rival, GameBoy, sit happily side by side.....