In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

82 Chapter 4 The Formation of Postwar Shōjo Manga, 1950–1969 Manga as it exists in Japan today is a postwar phenomenon, and this is true for shōjo manga as well as for other genres.1 The distinctive format and look of what is now the shōjo manga genre emerged in the early 1970s. The key features of shōjo manga are initial publication in a monthly or weekly magazine devoted exclusively to comics for girls, a predominance of female artists and a close relationship between fans and artists, a tendency toward homogender romance or an aesthetic of sameness in romantic pairs, and a distinctive visual aesthetic marked not only by large eyes but also emotive, decorative, and nonrepresentational layouts.2 Although shōjo manga is a postwar genre, its aesthetic and narrative features emerged from prewar girls’ culture, taking shape slowly through the 1950s and 1960s. This chapter will look at how shōjo manga developed out of prewar girls’ culture and how the work of a few important artists helped to define the genre’s subjects and visual style. Prewar girls’ culture had largely developed in girls’ magazines, which in the 1950s and 1960s shifted to publishing shōjo manga. Any discussion of the development of shōjo manga as a genre must consider the history of publication of those magazines. Manga of all genres in Japan today are generally published in monthly or weekly installments in thick anthology magazines that carry ten to twenty different stories per issue, along with a small amount of advertising and short letters columns or articles. These magazines use cheap newsprint paper and are intended to be read quickly, then thrown away or recycled. Popular manga series are then reprinted in paperback volumes on higher-quality paper. For this reason, most research and analysis of manga is done using these reprints; original magazines can be very hard to find. However, just as in the previous chapters I argued that girls’ culture is evident in all aspects of the magazines, including the letters and other reader-generated content, these types of content are important considerations in postwar magazines as well. Thus, in this chapter I examine how postwar shōjo manga magazines developed directly out of prewar girls’ literary magazines, what changed and what remained in the transition The Formation of Postwar Shōjo Manga 83 through the 1950s and 1960s, and how those changes shaped the emerging shōjo manga genre. Another important aspect of both prewar girls’ magazines and postwar shōjo manga is interactivity. As discussed in the previous two chapters, girl readers had a high level of interaction with prewar magazines, and thus they helped determine its style and focus, while at the same time the magazines’ content, perspectives , and themes helped shape how the girls saw themselves as girls (the classic push and pull of popular culture objects with their consumers). With prewar magazines, a quarter of the content was reader generated, in the form of fiction, poetry, art, and letters columns, in which girls interacted with editors in a friendly, informal way and posted notes to each other. Although postwar girls’ magazines did not devote as much space to reader-generated content, letters columns and fan feedback remained important. Like prewar magazines, postwar shōjo manga encouraged a close relationship between readers and artists . Most prewar girls’ magazines explicitly encouraged readers to submit their work as a means of nurturing new talent, and this practice carried over to postwar publishing as well. As I will discuss in the following section, through the 1950s and 1960s, many of the innovative artists began their careers as teenagers by submitting work to manga magazines. As a result, girls felt that the artists were close in age to themselves and understood their concerns, an impression fostered by the magazines. This sense of intimacy between artists and fans is still a part of shōjo manga fan culture today, regardless of the artist’s actual age. The second result of encouraging readers to become artists is that the genre came to be dominated by female artists and can seem like a female-only space. I will discuss how young female artists overtook shōjo manga publishing in the next chapter, but it is important to remember that this was not always the case; in the 1950s and 1960s male artists were also instrumental in creating the emerging genre. Another consistent aspect of both pre- and postwar girls’ culture is...

Share