Manga: The Images Tell More Than the Text

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Osamu Tezuka, the creator of the manga started his career in 1946. At the beginning of his career he mainly wrote shonen manga, but from the 1950’s he also wrote for adult and like the theme of the word war and its aftermath. Later he also dealt with sexuality, economics, alcoholism, nationalism in his comic series. He died in 1989, but the work he began got followers in Japan. (Power, 24-34)

Manga is not only a comic book, but it has also the characteristics of a prose, a fiction and a non-fiction.(Poitras, 49) The manga stories can even derive from novels. It touches a number of themes and it has stories for different age groups. The great variety of genres attracted many people, especially teenage girls. By 2000, the manga market spread in the west as well and it found new publishers and translators. It even encouraged young people to draw and to create graphic novels themselves. (Brenner, 12-13)

Apart from reading from the right to the left, manga series differ from western comic books mostly in their pictorial representation. The characters have a different design and the feelings and happenings are mainly expressed visually with full of symbols and effects, rather than by textual references. It demands active reading from the reader in order to understand all the signs. The readers can have a feeling that they are learning something new concerning the representation, the theme and the reading style. (Brenner, 75)

Osamu Tezuka had many followers, like Shinobu Ohtaka, who started to write a new manga called Magi with the title of The Labyrinth of Magic in 2009. It appeared in the Weekly Shonen Sunday Magazine and the story is not finished yet, because there are new volumes appearing nowadays as well. This is an Asian story,...

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