Manga (The word is composed of two Chinese characters –– the first meaning ‘lax’ and the second meaning ‘picture’) was a term said to have been coined by the great woodblock artist Hokusai, of the Edo period (1603 to 1868), to define his playful drawings of people and animals. Some suggest that the very nature of written Japanese –– ideograms drawn as stylised pictures of the words they represent –– facilitates the process of making comic style drawings. Today, Manga and anime are recognised as an art form and as a form of popular literature. In economic terms, weekly sales of comics in Japan exceed the entire annual output of the American comic industry. Several major manga magazines sell several million copies each per week and their vocabulary has become an intrinsic element of Japanese culture. That has emerged from a certain joy in combating these challenges.