Manga (漫画) is the Japanese word for comics and print cartoons. Outside of Japan, it usually refers specifically to Japanese comics. As of 2006, manga represents a $5 billion global market. Manga developed from a mixture of ukiyo-e and foreign styles of drawing, and took its current form shortly after World War II. It comes mainly in black and white, except for the covers and sometimes the first few pages, and in some Animanga all the pages are colored.

Popular manga are often adapted into anime (Japanese for animation) once a market interest has been established. (Manga is sometimes mistakenly called "anime" by those not familiar when not animated.) Adapted stories are often modified to appeal to a more mainstream market. Although not as common, original anime is sometimes adapted into manga (such as the Gundam franchise, Neon Genesis Evangelion and Cowboy Bebop).

Manga as people know it in the 20th and 21st centuries only really came into being after Dr. Osamu Tezuka, widely acknowledged to be the father of story-based manga, became popular. In 1945, Tezuka who was studying medicine, saw a war propaganda animation film called Momotarou Uminokaihei whose style was largely influenced by Disney's Fantasia. As a children's film, the main theme of Fantasia was peace and hope in a time of darkness. Tezuka was greatly inspired by the film and later decided to become a comic artist, which at the time (and even now) was an unthinkable choice for a qualified medical doctor. He later commented that a part of reason he went to medical school was to avoid conscription and that he actually did not like seeing blood.

Initially, his comic was published in a children's magazine. Soon, it became a specialized weekly or monthly comic magazine of its own, which is now the foundation of the Japanese comic industry.Tezuka adapted his comic to almost all film genres of the time; his manga series range from action adventure (e.g. Kimba the White Lion, also known as Jungle Emperor Leo) to serious drama (e.g. Black Jack) to science fiction (e.g. Astro Boy), horror (e.g. Dororo, The Three-eyed One.) Though he is known in the West as a creator of the children's animation Astro Boy, many of his comics had some very mature and sometimes dark undertones. Most of his comics' central characters had a tragic background. For instance, Atom (Astro Boy) was created by a grieving scientist who wanted to create an imitation of his dead son and later abandoned the boy; Kimba's father was killed by human hunters and the conflict between man and nature was a recurring theme for the comic; Hyakkimaru in Dororo was born severely crippled because his father offered 48 parts of Dororo's infant body to 48 demons.

Some criticize Tezuka's extensive use of tragic dramatization in his stories. As the manga generation of children grew up, the market for comics expanded accordingly and manga soon become a major cultural force of Japan. Tezuka also contributed to the social acceptance of manga. His qualification as a medical doctor as well as the holder of Ph.D in medical science as well as his serious storylines were used to deflect criticism that manga was vulgar and undesirable for children. He also mentored a number of important comic artists, such as Fujiko Fujio (creator of Doraemon), Fujio Akatsuka and Shotaro Ishinomori.

Manga magazines usually have many series running concurrently with approximately 20–40 pages allocated to each series per issue. These manga magazines, or "anthology magazines", as they are also known (colloquially "phone books"), are usually printed on low-quality newsprint and can be anywhere from 200 to more than 850 pages long. Manga magazines also contain one-shot comics and various four-panel yonkoma (equivalent to comic strips). Manga series can run for many years if they are successful. Manga artists sometimes start out with a few "one-shot" manga projects just to try to get their name out. If these are successful and receive good reviews, they are continued.

When a series has been running for a while, the stories are usually collected together and printed in dedicated book-sized volumes, called tankōbon. These are the equivalent of American comic's trade paperbacks. These volumes use higher-quality paper, and are useful to those who want to "catch up" with a series so they can follow it in the magazines or if they find the cost of the weeklies or monthlies to be prohibitive. Recently, "deluxe" versions have also been printed as readers have gotten older and the need for something special grew. Old manga have also been reprinted using somewhat lesser quality paper and sold for 100 yen (approximately one US Dollar) each to compete with the used book market.

Manga are primarily classified by the age and gender of the target audience. In particular, books and magazines sold to boys (shōnen) and girls (shōjo) have distinctive cover art and are placed on different shelves in most bookstores.

Japan also has manga cafés, or manga kissaten. At a manga kissaten, people drink coffee and read manga.

Traditionally, manga are written from right to left. Some publishers of translated manga keep that format, but some switch the direction to left to right, so as not to confuse foreign readers. This practice is known as "flipping" and is often criticized by the readers and even the artists themselves, citing that it goes against their original intentions (for example, if a person wears a shirt that reads "may" on it, and gets flipped, then the word is altered to "yam".

Manga has proved to be a quickly growing industry in America, tripling three times in the past three years to be a $180 million market in 2005. Also as evidenced of their pervasiveness, at least 40 syndicated newspaper have added manga strips to their funny pages.[ Manga has also been noted for making female readers interested in comics. In a nation where the normal comic book readership is largely dominated by males, females make up an unheard of 60% of all manga readership.