While manga today commonly refers to a style of comics from Japan, its meaning has evolved over time.
Historically, the term has encompassed a wide range of visual forms, including sketches, caricatures, multi-panel cartoons and even foreign comics and graphic novels.
Exner, E. (2022) Comics and the Origins of Manga: a revisionist history. Rutgers University Press
The Hokusai Manga comprises thousands of images in ten volumes from 1814 to 1819, with five volumes added from 1834 to 1878. The word manga in the title does not refer to the contemporary story-telling manga, as the sketches in the work are not connected to each other. While manga has come to mean "comics" in modern Japanese, the word was used in the Edo period to mean informal drawings, possibly preparatory sketches for paintings.
In the preface to Vol. 1, Hokusai uses the word manga in an uncommon way, translated as "brush gone wild."
Imaizumi Ippyo popularized the term manga to describe multi-panel cartoons he imported from the United States and published in the Japanese newspaper Jiji Shinpo.
Jiji Shinpo (1890)
In 1902, chief cartoonist Kitzazawa Rakuten started a regular cartoon and graphic narrative column called Jiji Manga. The supplement's popularity helped establish the word "manga" as a more specialized term for humorous and narrative cartoons, rather than sketches.
In 1923, Japanese tabloid Asahi Graph started publishing George McManus’s popular American cartoon Bringing Up Father in translation. These translations of Bringing Up Father and other American comics are referred to as “American manga.”
The immense popularity of imported comics encouraged Japanese artists to create similar works. One of the earliest examples was Suiho Tagawa’s Norakuro (1931), a manga inspired by Felix the Cat.
Influenced by foreign and domestic comics as well as animation, Osamu Tezuka starts publishing narrative manga in 1946. He is often referred to as “the god of manga.”
Tezuka's Astro Boy, serialized in Shonen Magazine from 1952 to 1968, significantly shaped the development of manga with its foundational style and storytelling approach.