Japan has a long and rich history of original graphic arts that include painting, printmaking, calligraphy, and, more recently, serial art such as comic books and animated films. [A] The well-established comics’ publishing houses and drawing studios in Japan mean that Japanese readers of all ages can choose from a wide variety of high-quality comics that are unique in a variety of ways.

Additionally, Japanese comics are distinctive from most American comics because they read right to left and from the back of the book to the front cover, just like regular Japanese books. [B] At first, when Japanese comics were translated into English and other languages that read left to right, the art was flipped and the page order reversed. As a result, American publisher Tokyopop has led a growing movement to keep the original art and order of translated manga, thereby preserving the artists intended presentation of their books.

[C] Osamu Tezuka was among the initial Japanese comics artists who “developed their wartime exposure to Western comics into a form that reflected Japanese techniques and experiences,” according to scholar Francisca Goldsmith. While underground comics in the United States found a wider audience after the introduction of graphic novels in the 1980s, sophisticated mature comics for adult readers have flourished in Japan since the 1950s. [D] Japanese artists began exporting translated comics such as Astro Boy in the 1960s, and such comics became more widely available in English-speaking countries with the growth of manga distributors and publishers in the 1990s.

[ ] [9] Similar to American graphic novels, which range in topics from superheroes to politics. Manga tell many different kinds of stories and have art to match. There were funny manga, action-packed manga, fantastic manga, and manga that tell realistic stories about believable characters. Manga style has also influenced, manhwa, Chinese, and Korean comics, and its rhetoric is even used today in original American graphic novels, which reveals that Japanese graphic novels have taken a strong hold in the Western world.

_{Adapted from “The Importance of Japanese Comics.” Graphic Novels. http://www.ipl.org/div/graphicnovels/gnsImpJapComs.html.}