Comic Showa-shi
Showa: A History of Japan

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The Kodansha Manga Award (講談社漫画賞, Koudansha Manga Shou) is an annual award for serialized manga published in the previous year, the event is sponsored by the publisher Kodansha. It is currently awarded in three categories: shounen, shoujo, and general. The awards began in 1977, initially with categories for shounen and shoujo. The first award for the general category was in 1982, and the first children's category's award was in 2003. The children's category was merged into the shounen and shoujo categories starting in 2015.

Manga that capture genuine stories or experiences of real people. Fictional biographies such as Tezuka's Buddha are not within the scope of this list.

(List is currently very lacking.)

A selection of titles from the gekiga scene, a short-lived yet influential artistic movement that flourished during the 1960s to the 1970s and maintains a prominent underground presence today. While mostly known as a pioneer of cinematic paneling and close attention to realism, it would be more accurate to consider gekiga as a counterculture. Surrealistic, autobiographical, and experimental works emerged as an alternative to the Tezuka school of aesthetics and paved the way for other artists to different modes of expression.

This is in NO WAY a comprehensive list and should be treated more as a starting point for diving into this movement. There are so many more important artists and titles in the scene that MAL unfortunately does not have entries for, and probably never will. Since I can't speak Japanese, there may also be some titles that I am unfamiliar with. The 50-title limit doesn't help either, but I hope this gets you started in this often-unexplored side of manga.

Note: Not all of these titles are available in English.
11/04/2022 Updated to include more underground artists.

If you enjoyed this interest stack and want to learn more about gekiga, feel free to check these other outlets:
The MAL Gekiga Club
Taniguchi Scanlations
Habanero Scans
Illuminati-Manga
Hox Scanlations
Stinky Scans
Ryan Holmberg's translations
Star Fruit Books
Glacier Bay Books
Koenji Shawn Reviews
The Comics Journal
Breakdown Press
Drawn and Quarterly
New York Review Comics
AX Volume 1: A Collection of Alternative Manga

Part 1: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/4205

While it might look like you don't really need to know all of this, you never know when it will be useful: for instance with quizzes, random questions that you wouldn't know the answer to otherwise, fun facts to tell someone else, or if there's trouble or necessity of intervention in your vicinity.

=> Stack (1/2): https://myanimelist.net/stacks/9663

Honorable mentions:
-Apocalypse no Toride is a horror manga that could be included due to a couple of educational parts, such as acute hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) and its effects induced by intravenous insulin injections; however a lot of it is not really fitting to be put in here.
-Genius Martial Arts Trainer (MAL ID 170657): Fitness

(Also thanks to Lylaaz and abystoma2)

Manga critical of war and militarism. Showing the atrocities of war, the consequences of it or promoting diplomacy and peaceful conflict resolution. Some of them also critically dealing with wars in Japanese history.

An ever growing list of hits set in the early Showa Era. For convenience, I have put the division at 1945.

This stack is still under active construction and will be updated.

Using the same distinction between Literary and Genre Fiction.
Manga that focus on characters and themes rather than plot, and don't conform to a genre.

Literary manga != Good manga

Please feel free to message me any suggestions or alterations you feel should be made! I plan to regularly update this list.

A list of manga and related works that have been/are being published in Portugal (in Portuguese ofc) AS OF MARCH 2025 (will update over time)