Gekiga (åç», 'dramatic pictures') is the term coined by Yoshihiro Tatsumi in 1957 to distinguish a new style of serious adult-oriented Japanese comics from 'manga,' which at the time carried connotations of children's entertainment. The gekiga movement is one of the formative episodes in postwar manga history and the institutional starting point of seinen manga.
The kashihon context
In the 1950s, a large share of working-class Japanese comics readership operated through the kashihon (貞æ¬) rental-book system: small lending libraries rented comics for a small daily fee. Kashihon-market comics targeted older readers and were produced under less editorial constraint than the children's magazines published in Tokyo by Shueisha, Shogakukan, and Kodansha. The Osaka-based artists who would form the gekiga circle â Tatsumi, Takao Saito (later of Golgo 13), Masahiko Matsumoto, Shoichi Sakurai â worked in the kashihon market.
The 1957 Gekiga Manifesto
In 1957, Tatsumi and his collaborators founded the Gekiga KÅbÅ ('Gekiga Workshop') and circulated a one-page document distinguishing gekiga from manga along several axes: realism in drawing, mature subject matter, cinematic page composition, and an adult readership. The manifesto is brief and somewhat polemical, but its institutional consequence was significant â it gave editors a vocabulary for commissioning and packaging serious adult comics.
Reception in Tokyo magazines
Through the 1960s, gekiga conventions began appearing in Tokyo-based magazines that had not previously published adult-oriented work. Kodansha's launch of Big Comic (1967), Shogakukan's launch of Manga Action (1967), and the subsequent founding of Garo (1964) and COM (1967) provided publication venues for gekiga work outside the kashihon system. By the mid-1970s, gekiga conventions had been substantially absorbed into the seinen magazine system, and the gekiga label fell into less frequent use.