The three largest publishers of manga are Kodansha, Shogakkan, and Shueisha. There are some ten publishing firms which come in second, including Akita Shoten, Futabasha, Shonen Gahosha, Hakusensha, Nihon Bungeisha, and Kobunsha. This is not even to mention the other small-scale publishing firms. The larger publishers mentioned above also publish magazines and books in areas outside of manga.
There are around 3000 professional manga artists in Japan. These individuals have published at least one volume of manga, but most of them make their living as assistants to famous manga artists or have some other form of income. Only a small percentage of these are able to make a good living on Manga alone. There are also a great number of amateur manga artists who produce small magazines intended for private circulation, called dojinshi.
Japanese Manga Characteristics
It is exceedingly rare for manga in Japan to be written for Just publication in book form. Often they are first serialized in installments of twenty to thirty pages and subsequently compiled as a book. Because they are originally published in magazines, they tend to be black and white. Popular works can be serialized over several years and run into dozens of volumes when they are released in book form.
Manga is one of the most well-known and respected types of publications in Japan. The pictoral art that is manga has garnered as much clout as even novels and magazines in the Japanese culture, and manga takes up a fair amount of the publishing "pie" each year. Even though entertainment takes many different forms these days, lots of people are still avid manga readers. This begs the question "why"? Why is it that a simple black and white publication of pictures is so popular?
First I would like to share some information on the Manga industry. The manga industry in Japan is of such a large scale as to completely engulf the industries of the United States and France, which also produce comics.
The term "manga" is itself a word that was not a part of the earliest Japanese words. In fact, the term was coined well after the first examples of what could be called "manga". In the 6th and 7th centuries, monks used to create scrolls which acted as calendars to keep track of time. These scrolls would consist of symbolic icons to represent time, and be decorated with pictures of animals such as foxes, raccoons, and the like, all acting as if they were humans. This was partly done as a form of satire, as the pictures sometimes told stories, but these were the first known "pictoral art" that could be called manga.
