Manga in the 1960s and 1970s
5The Turn · 59The weekly magazines, the sports stories of guts, the students who read manga, and the decades when the medium grew up.
5Filed under 5. The Turn takes a turn, and this explainer is changes one.
The weekly magazines
On 17 March 1959, Shogakukan's Weekly Shōnen Sunday and Kodansha's Weekly Shōnen Magazine both launched. Until then, children's manga had appeared mainly in monthly magazines and rental books. The weekly schedule changed everything: stories became faster, artists needed assistants, and readers came back every week. Weekly Shōnen Jump followed in 1968.
Guts and suffering
The great boys' manga of the 1960s were spokon sports stories, above all Ikki Kajiwara's Star of the Giants and Ashita no Joe. Their heroes trained to the point of collapse, and their mood matched a country working hard through its economic boom.
Students and adults
The children who grew up on manga kept reading. By 1970 university students were famously said to carry a left-wing journal in one hand and Weekly Shōnen Magazine in the other. When students hijacked a Japanese airliner that year, they declared, "We are Ashita no Joe." The realistic, adult gekiga style that had begun in rental books entered the mainstream, and new adult magazines appeared, publishing series such as Lupin III and Golgo 13.
Darker and stranger
Manga for older children grew more ambitious. Osamu Tezuka began Phoenix in his experimental magazine COM and Black Jack in Jump. Go Nagai's Devilman and Kazuo Umezu's horror pushed violence further than before.
A revolution in shōjo
In the 1970s a generation of women artists, often called the Year 24 Group, transformed girls' manga. Moto Hagio, Riyoko Ikeda and others brought psychological depth, science fiction and historical epics such as The Rose of Versailles to shōjo.
Why it matters
By the end of the 1970s, manga had become a medium for all ages and every genre. The forms established then, from the weekly magazine to the sports manga and the adult thriller, still shape manga today.
Where this explainer is shelved
The arithmetic is unremarkable and worth doing anyway: 59 across 6 words, reducing to 5. The weight sits in “Manga”, which carries 18 on its own and reduces to 9.
What the 5 brings is change. The reference files it as a turn. Whatever else this explainer is doing, it is doing it with the 5's restlessness and hunger for change.
Heart's Desire 8, Personality 6: power underneath, responsibility on the surface. The gap between them is where the subject is most interesting.
The 5 asks you to ask what was abandoned, and whether it deserved to be. The 5 moves for the sake of moving. Not every break documented here led anywhere, and the reference says so where it did not. The other explainers that reduce to 5 are collected on The Turn.
Common questions
- When did weekly manga magazines begin?
- The first weekly manga magazines for boys, Weekly Shōnen Sunday and Weekly Shōnen Magazine, both launched on 17 March 1959. Weekly Shōnen Jump followed in 1968.
- What is spokon?
- The sports story of guts and suffering that dominated boys' manga in the 1960s, in series such as Star of the Giants and Ashita no Joe.
- Did adults read manga in the 1960s?
- Increasingly, yes. University students famously read Weekly Shōnen Magazine, and adult manga magazines were launched in the late 1960s.
- What happened to girls' manga in the 1970s?
- A generation of women artists, often called the Year 24 Group, transformed shōjo manga with complex psychology, science fiction and historical epics.