Abstract
In Japan, there is a centuries-old tradition of picture stories. Comics with their typical combination of pictures and text, however, only develop around the turn of the last century, when the principle of speech balloons was adopted from American newspapers. The term 'manga' is traced back to the famous Japanese woodcut artist Hokusai (1760-1849) and means 'picture story'. If the word is not written in the usual hiragana syllabary but in kanji, it can also be translated as unreliable pictures (cf. e.g. Nitschke 1995, 233) or spontaneous pictures by combining the two characters man (unreliable, inaccurate, spontaneous, morally corrupt) and ga (picture). Today, manga is used as a generic term for all kinds of Japanese cartoons, magazines and newspaper comics as well as comic books. In addition, loan words such as komikkusu and other terms such as gekiga (dramatic pictures, graphic novels) are used for special genres. In Europe and America, the term manga is used to describe both Japanese comics and - regardless of origin - comics with typical Japanese stylistic elements.
