Hentai manga is a genre of drawn Japanese content known for its pornographic adult imagery and themes. It is found in pornographic graphic novels, comic books and online. It differs from anime hentai, which refers to pornographic animated TV shows or movies.
Hentai manga may be referred to as manga hentai, mangahentai, hentai porn or manga porn.
Manga is a Japanese compound of the prefix man-, meaning aimless, and the suffix -ga, meaning pictures. Hentai is another compound word that translates to change appearance or metamorphosis. In a sexual context, it implies a change from sexual norms to a state of perversion or abnormal sexual desires.
Because hentai manga features hand- or computer-drawn images, the content has limitless possibilities. There is manga hentai featuring BDSM practices, characters with a range of genders and sexual identities, and characters that are human and nonhuman. The development of hentai manga reflects Japanese cultural and historic attitudes to sex. Numerous subgenres reflect a variety of sex acts, relationships and fetishes. While all hentai manga features sexual imagery, it does not necessarily involve intercourse.
Japanese people have a long history of creating erotic art that stretches back to the 16th-century Shunga works. Osama Tezuka pioneered manga with the release of his first comic, New Treasure Island, in 1947. Early manga had sexual content, but it wasn’t until the release of ero-gekiga magazines like Manga Erotopia and Erogenica in the 1970s that sex became the focus and hentai manga was born. Hentai Manga reached the United States in the 1990s.