Josei manga (女性漫画, lit. "women's comics", pronounced [dʑoseː]), also known as ladies' comics (レディースコミック) and its abbreviation redikomi (レディコミ, "lady-comi"), is an editorial category of Japanese comics that emerged in the 1980s. In a strict sense, josei refers to manga marketed to an audience of adult women, contrasting shōjo manga, which is marketed to an audience of girls and young adult women.[a] In practice, the distinction between shōjo and josei is often tenuous; while the two were initially divergent categories, many manga works exhibit narrative and stylistic traits associated with both shōjo and josei manga. This distinction is further complicated by a third manga editorial category, young ladies (ヤングレディース), which emerged in the late 1980s as an intermediate category between shōjo and josei.
Josei manga is traditionally printed in dedicated manga magazines which often specialize in a specific subgenre, typically drama, romance, or pornography. While josei dramas are, in most cases, realist stories about the lives of ordinary women, romance josei manga are typically soap opera–influenced melodramas, while pornographic josei manga shares many common traits with pornographic manga for a heterosexual male audience. The emergence of manga for an adult female audience as a category in the 1980s was preceded by the rise of gekiga in the 1950s and 1960s, which sought to use manga to tell serious and grounded stories aimed at adult audiences, and by the development of more narratively complex shōjo manga by artists associated with the Year 24 Group in the 1970s. The category became stigmatized in the late 1980s as it came to be associated with pornographic manga, though it gained greater artistic legitimacy in the 1990s as it shifted to social issue-focused stories. Josei manga has been regularly adapted into anime since the 2000s.
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