Gekiga

Gekiga (劇画^?) is Japanese term for "dramatic pictures". It was coined by Yoshihiro Tatsumi and adopted by other more serious Japanese cartoonists, who did not want their trade to be known as manga or "whimsical pictures". It is akin to Americans who started using the term "graphic novel", as opposed to "comic book".

Tatsumi began publishing "gekiga" in 1957. Gekiga was vastly different from most manga at the time, which were aimed at children. Gekiga "dramatic pictures" emerged not from the mainstream manga publications in Tokyo, headed by Osamu Tezuka, but from the lending libraries based out of Osaka. The lending library industry then tolerated more experimental and offensive works to be published than the mainstream "Tezuka camp" did.

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the children who had grown up reading manga wanted something aimed at older audiences and gekiga provided for that niche. That particular generation came to be known as the "manga generation" because it read manga as a form of rebellion, which was similar to the role that rock and roll played for hippies in the United States). Manga reading was particularly common in the 1960s, among anti-U.S.-Japan Security Treaty and labor-oriented student protest groups.

Because of the growing popularity of originally-underground comics, even Osamu Tezuka began to display the influence of gekiga cartoonists, in works such as Hi no Tori (Phoenix), produced in the early 1970s, and especially in Adolf, produced in the early 1980s. Adolf has heavy influences from Tatsumi's artwork, with more realistic styling and darker settings than most of Tezuka’s work. In turn, Tatsumi was influenced by Tezuka though storytelling techniques.

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