The first shojo manga worthy of the name began to appear in the mid-fifties. Before that time there were only lyrical comics much like those of the prewar, written by men and published in women's magazines. In the mid-1950s girls magazines began actively to serialize comics just as magazines for boys began to shift from education- and entertainment-based content to pure manga form. Until this time very few women had professional careers and thus there were very few women manga artists. For this reason most comics for girls were produced by male artists like Tezuka Osamu and Yokoyama Mitsuteru. Tezuka's "Knight in Ribbons" recounted the exploits of a woman knight in male drag. This work was influenced by the all-women Takarazuka Revue, where women played men's roles, and provided young girls with an imaginary space onto which to project their desire for liberation from repressive gender divisions.

In the mid-1950s, women manga artists began serializing in girls manga magazines tales of mother-daughter relationships, the worlds of entertainment and high society, romantic love (albeit only the most insipidly sentimental kind), and supernatural experiences. This was an age of women manga artists creating works for other women and was essentially devoid of works suitable for men. The only exception was Mizuno Hideko, the single spot of feminine color in the legendary Tokiwa group, whose no-holds-barred work "Fire," which featured a rock singer as its protagonist, also enjoyed a male readership.

The mid-1970s saw the emergence of "New Wave" shojo manga, which included artists then in their mid-twenties such as Hagio Moto, Takemiya Keiko, Oshima Yumiko, and Yamagishi Ryoko. These women belonged to a generation brought up on postwar manga. They produced manga dealing with science fiction, fantasy, and young boys in love. Portrayals of young homosexual boys in love with each other seem to have struck girl readers as more romantic than the coarse reality of heterosexual romance and also gave the artists more freedom to exercise their creativity. Needless to say, these tales of homosexual romance were also played out in imagined Occidental settings. These new works went beyond the boundaries of shojo manga as it had been and, liberated from the imperative to be "ladylike," went on to achieve a significant male readership as well. As a result, many female manga artists began to be commissioned to write for magazines aimed at men and boys.

With the increasing specialization of manga magazines in the eighties publishers began to compete to bring out more and more new magazines. Whereas manga for women had previously been limited to those written with young girls in mind, a new market began to develop for manga intended for adult women. These new women's comics dealt with adult love affairs, marriage, and social and historical themes which would not have been appropriate as shojo manga. In Japanicized English this new genre is known as "redisu komikku," or "ladies comics."

The late 1980s saw the appearance of a number of pornographic manga magazines within the ladies comic genre. They were brought out by smaller publishing houses but quickly stole audiences away from the more moderate ladies comics. These manga treat topics ranging from rape to incest, to lesbianism, scatology and necrophilia. But even with this outrageous content, not all of them rehearse reactionary notions of sex. Many of them also incorporate a progressive vision of sexuality promoting human rights and women's liberation.