Walk into any UK bookshop today and you'll find shelves groaning with Japanese manga. Streaming services overflow with anime adaptations. What was once a niche interest has become a defining cultural force for young Western audiences. The timing couldn't be better for Andrea Horbinski's scholarly yet accessible exploration of manga's formative century.

Horbinski challenges the conventional narrative. While earlier histories, including Frederik L. Schodt's influential Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics (1983), trace manga's lineage back a millennium through Japanese visual art, Horbinski locates its true origins in the early 1900s. This was when a modernising Japan, eager to shed its feudal past, absorbed global influences including the political cartoon.

The pivotal moment came in 1905 with Tokyo Puck. Its editor, Kitazawa Rakuten, redefined manga – literally 'whimsical pictures' – as political satire. The form gradually expanded into social commentary and beyond. Artists who later claimed ancient roots for manga were, Horbinski argues, romanticising Japan's pre-modern past. She positions manga as fundamentally modern: borrowing speech bubbles and panel layouts from abroad, produced through industrial methods, and shaped by reader feedback.

Whether or not you accept this thesis, Horbinski's integration of manga into Japanese social history is compelling. In 1920s manga, we see male anxiety about independent urban women manifested in Kitazawa's depictions of them as vain, greedy, even as prostitutes and drug users. Female characters became vehicles for erotic and violent male fantasies. As concerns grew about declining family values and Western cultural influence – from Parisian fashion to Hollywood films – manga artists amplified these themes, particularly as children's manga gained traction.

The first children's manga sensation, Norakuro, exemplifies this cultural entanglement. Launched in 1931, it followed a bumbling stray dog serving in an all-canine Imperial Japanese Army. Creator Tagawa Suihō's breakthrough was importing rakugo comedy techniques into manga, making it funny through wordplay rather than just visual gags or satire. Norakuro also pioneered reader engagement through magazine 'readers' corners'. But the series couldn't escape Japan's militarisation: the lovable incompetent eventually found himself fighting pigs on the continent – a thinly veiled reference to Japan's Chinese adversaries.

Horbinski's postwar chapters introduce Sazae-san, the housewife protagonist created by Hasegawa Machiko, whose domestic adventures dominated manga from 1946 to 1974. Then there's Tezuka Osamu, manga's 'godfather', who rejected the notion that manga must be comedic. Haunted by Japan's militarist descent, he introduced tragedy into the medium's emotional range.

Even grittier was gekiga ('dramatic pictures'), packed with cinematic action and aimed at high schoolers. This marked the first time modern manga was driven purely by market forces. The result was lurid, violent, and vulgar – prompting a mid-1950s 'ban bad books' movement that saw public book burnings. The industry survived because young readers remained loyal and because television, from the 1960s onward, amplified manga's cultural reach exponentially.

Tezuka pioneered this transition. His 1963 Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy) revolutionised anime production, developing cost-cutting animation techniques to compensate for Japan's shortage of animators and establishing merchandising as a revenue stream. Critics have rightly noted his role in normalising poor pay and punishing working conditions. He also contributed to the increasingly rigid division between boys' and girls' manga. Yet it was female creators like Ikeda Riyoko who brought emotional and physical realism to girls' manga. Her The Rose of Versailles (1972-73) reportedly moved female students to such inconsolable tears that teachers suspended classes when the final instalment appeared.

By the 1970s, self-published manga was well established, but fandom now began reshaping the medium in unprecedented ways: conventions emerged, cosplay took off, and otaku – initially a pejorative for obsessive superfans – became a badge of honour. Horbinski's endpoint of 1989 is well chosen: that year saw the deaths of Tezuka Osamu, Tagawa Suihō, and Emperor Hirohito, alongside the 'otaku murderer's' killing of four schoolgirls, which reignited moral panic about manga's influence.

Yet so much has happened since – not least manga's global conquest – that a sequel feels essential.

• Manga's First Century: How Creators and Fans Made Japanese Comics, 1905-1989
  Andrea Horbinski
  University of California Press, 448pp, £80
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Christopher Harding is Senior Lecturer in Asian History at the University of Edinburgh.