Yoshihiro Tatsumi (1935–2015) coined the term gekiga (劇画, 'dramatic pictures') in 1957 to distinguish his serious adult-oriented comics from the term 'manga,' which carried connotations of children's entertainment. The gekiga movement opened the medium to seinen and adult subject matter in the 1960s and is one of the formative episodes in postwar manga history.
Origins of gekiga
Tatsumi grew up in postwar Osaka and worked in the kashihon (rental-book) market, which served working-class adult readers and was less constrained by the editorial conventions of children's magazines. In 1957, frustrated by being categorised alongside children's manga, he and a group of fellow Osaka artists adopted 'gekiga' as a new label for their work — denser linework, cinematic page composition, and subject matter drawn from adult life: crime, sex, urban poverty, war memory.
Selected works
- Black Blizzard (1956) — early long-form crime story.
- Short-story collections of the 1960s–1970s, later collected in English as The Push Man and Other Stories, Abandon the Old in Tokyo, and Good-bye.
- A Drifting Life (2008) — 800-page autobiographical work on postwar manga history.
Reception
Tatsumi's late-career rediscovery by English-language publishers — Drawn & Quarterly published five volumes of his short fiction between 2005 and 2012 under the editorship of Adrian Tomine — gave him an international readership and made gekiga a topic in Western comics criticism. His memoir A Drifting Life won the Eisner Award in 2010.