Know your manga

How big is manga?

It's a multi-billion-pound industry, fuelled by its readers and viewers. It's immensely popular with people of every age in Japan and increasingly across the world. With hundreds of genres, from sports to love, and from horror to sexual identity, there is a manga for everyone.

A particularly popular example is One Piece, by Oda Eiichiro, which tells the adventures of a boy whose body has become rub-berised after eating "gum-gum fruit" and who travels the world on a pirate ship in search of a priceless treasure: the legendary One Piece. Created for the publisher Shueisha in 1997, it's still going strong and has filled 91 individual volumes. One Piece has more than 440 million books in circulation worldwide, making it the best-selling manga of all time and earning it a place in the Guinness Book of World Records.