ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the socio-historical context of the development of gekiga as alternative comics, examining the shifting media ecology, its formal innovations and readership, and its impact on other artistic and cultural practices. It focuses on two key players in the development of gekiga: Tatsumi Yoshihiro and Shirato Sanpei. Gekiga grew in tandem with Japanese counterculture in the 1960s, when Japan witnessed student uprisings, civic and intellectual participation in politics, and artistic radical experimentalism. Counterculture in Japan germinated in multiple locales and contexts, taking diverse cultural forms and media: comics being one of them. Japanese countercultural praxes largely responded to nation's specific conjunctures but were in synch with radical cultural movements in other parts of the globe. Although neither critic discusses the reason for the inventions of new onomatopoeia, it is probable that gekiga artists strove to make comics medium more alluring to compete with other audiovisual media, particularly television that was entering into the everyday mediascape in the mid-1950s.
