There is a huge variety of manga, "Kodomo" for young children, "Shojo" for female teenagers, "Shonen" for male teenagers, "Seinen" for (young) men and "Josei" for (young) women. The last three, which explore Japanese everyday life, are expanded by a variety of science fiction worlds or the depiction of sexual fantasies.

In Germany, anime first became known to a wider (children's) audience in the 1970s and 1980. Children's series including "Heidi," "Maya the Bee" and "Vicky the Viking" were co-productions that used material from Western children's literature. The anime style was introduced to audiences via familiar stories suitable for children.

Anime and manga, which were usually their templates, grew in popularity at the same time. Popular anime series in the 1990s included "Sailor Moon" and "Mila Superstar." The strong female characters have a considerable fan base in Germany to this day.

"Akira" is a 2,200-page epic by Katsuhiro Otomo about the struggle for survival of a group of teenagers and children with special powers in a post-apocalyptic Tokyo. The first volume published in Germany in 1991 was in color and adapted to Western habits. Today, manga are mostly in black and white and are read from back to front, as they are in Japan.

At least in Germany, the Dragonball series were the breakthrough for Japanese comics in 1998. Akira Toriyama's 8,000-page adventure saga was a huge success. In black and white and in Japanese reading style, in an inexpensive paperback format, the manga was a hit with young people and children.

Manga have a historical dimension, too — many refer to the picture stories in woodblock printing, which became a mass phenomenon in Japan from 1680 onward. The most famous graphic storyteller of the Edo period (1603 to 1868), Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849, seen in a self-portrait), called them manga.

The original folding books of the Edo period feature the same whimsical creatures that found their way into children's rooms in the 21st century as Pokemons. They all come from the rich cosmos of the Yokai, the Japanese demons. These wondrous, at times ludicrous creatures inspired the manga and games culture, and Japanese horror and monster films.

"Spirited Away," the story of a little girl's visit to a bathhouse for Japan's more than 40 million gods, also originated in this fantastical world. Hayao Miyazaki fleshed it out into an anime that reached a worldwide audience via Netflix.

Hollywood too discovered the manga/anime/video game connection. In 2017, "Ghost in the Shell" by Masamune Shirow, one of the best-known manga, was released as a blockbuster film adaptation starring Scarlett Johansson, a casting that brought accusations of whitewashing.

Osamu Tezuka (1928-1989) is considered the founder of modern manga. He regarded himself as a humanist and pacifist, skeptical of swift technological and social developments and was sensitive in his examination of his era. "Astro Boy," "Black Jack," "Princess Sapphire" and "Kimba" are his best-known works.

In the West, too, major exhibitions and retrospectives celebrate the artistic quality of the works of mangaka — the people who create manga — including Naoki Urasawa (pictured), Jiro Taniguchi and the recently deceased Kazuki Takahashi. Manga is increasingly recognized as a valuable cultural asset, not just a temporary youth cult.

Early on, manga addressed taboo subjects in the West. There are entire manga sections on homosexuality, the Shonen manga for male love. Tsumuji Yoshimura's "The Gender of Mona Lisa" poses the question of gender identity. The manga is after all set in a world in which all people are born genderless.