What are Japanese comics? 

Syndicated comic strips, which fill an entire page of most American daily newspapers, do not exist in Japan.  Each Japanese newspaper has its own four-panel family strip, barely visible on the next-to-the-last page.  Color supplements appear, but there are no "Sunday Funnies" in the American tradition.  And political and social satire cartoons, which once thrived in most dailies, have withered in size and significance.

The most common form of Japanese comic today is the story-comic.  Most often, Japanese anime is first serialized in comic magazines and then compiled into books, and in its entirety may be thousands of pages long.  The comic magazines- where most Japanese comics first appear - are targeted separately at boys, girls, men, and women, but all are today characterized by an increasing crossover of readership.  The bear little resemblance to American comic books.

The American therm "comic book" is in fact a misnomer for a magazine of thirty or so color pages, many of which today are advertisements.  It is purchased, almost without exception, by young boys who read it and by adult men with comic book collections.  Sales of the American comic book have declined dramatically since the 1950's, when the industry was nearly destroyed by overregulation and competition from television.  Issued monthly, a circulation of 300,000 is unusual.  There are no no weeklies.

The most widely read comic magazines in Japan are what are loosely known as shonen manga ("boys' comics") and shojo manga ("girls' comics").  They have squared, glued backs, and are as thick as telephone books.  The average boys' comic magazine, at less than a dollar, is quite a bargain:  it has 350 pages and contains as many as fifteen serialized and concluding stories - only 10 or 20 pages are devoted to ads or text.  The cover and the first few pages are printed in eye-catching color on glossy paper, but unlike American comics the stories inside are in monochrome.  As if to compensate, the first story may be printed in black ink with one color - such as red - overlaid.  For variation, the rest of the stories may be printed on different shades of paper, usually rough and recycled.

Few magazines of any kind anywhere in the world can match the circulations of the Japanese boys' comic magazines.  I the 1980's and 1990's the top four were: Shonen Jump, Shonen Champion, Shonen Magazine, and Shonen Sunday - all weeklies - had combined sales of nearly 8.5 million.  Shonen Jump sometimes sells over 4 million copies a week.  The popular American magazine Newsweek sells about the same number of copies as Shonen Jump, but Japan's populations is only half that of the United States.