What this genre is
Shigeru Mizuki, who came up through kamishibai and rental manga, set off a yokai boom with GeGeGe no Kitaro. Together with Umezu's horror, it gave Japanese manga a lasting lineage of the other world.
Shonen — about this band: What the weekly boys' magazines built: effort, friendship, victory — and the dark fantasy that came after.
Connections
Three kinds of line: direct evolution, influence, and born in reaction against.
↓ Flowed into this
↑ Grew out of this
Key works
The cornerstone of yokai manga, developed out of the kamishibai serial Kitaro of the Graveyard. Much of what Japanese people picture when they hear yokai was made here.
Human malice drawn on an apocalyptic scale, pushing past what boys' manga was thought able to say. The ancestor of later dark fantasy.
The mismatched pair of the boy Ushio and the yokai Tora take on great demons. Fierce friendship and forceful drawing make it a masterpiece of the yokai battle manga.
Kagome, a modern girl who slips into the Warring States period, and the half-demon Inuyasha. A long work fusing yokai with romance, and a landmark of the 1990s and 2000s.
A fantasy about the relationship between mushi and people. A cycle of short stories highly praised for its still, poetic world.
The story of Tanjiro, whose family was killed by demons. Taisho design, Japanese motifs and the uncanny, multiplied by the anime, produced a historic boom.
A youth battle manga where the occult and aliens collide. Overwhelming drawing and pace made it a much-discussed web-born hit.
Shonen — walk the band
Genres in the same band, in order of year. You are at the highlighted one.
- 1950 Monthly Boys' Magazines↓
- 1959 Weekly Shonen Magazines↓
- 1965 Yokai & Horror（you are here）↓
- 1966 Sports & Guts↓
- 1978 Shonen Rom-Com↓
- 1984 Jump Golden Age↓
- 2003 Mind Games↓
- 2009 Dark Fantasy↓
- 2012 Isekai
All genres
About this entry
Genre boundaries are drawn where the network of manga happens to concentrate, not by decree. Years are approximate. Where opinions differ, this page says so rather than picking a winner.