The Gag Manga Tradition: From Osamu Tezuka's Early Work to One Punch Man

Gag manga — manga structured primarily around comedy rather than narrative development — is one of the medium's foundational traditions, predating the serialized action that most international readers associate with Japanese comics. The form's early history runs through the postwar newspaper comic strips, through Osamu Tezuka's own early comedic work, and through a set of magazines and anthologies in the 1960s and 1970s that developed gag manga as a distinct commercial category with its own conventions, its own stars, and its own relationship to the broader manga landscape.

Akira Toriyama's "Dr. Slump" (1980–1984) is the gag manga that most clearly demonstrates what the form can achieve at its best. The series follows the inventor Senbei Norimaki and his android creation Arale-chan in a series of loosely connected comedic episodes that prioritize the joke over continuity, parody over consistency, and Toriyama's evident delight in visual comedy over any obligation to narrative coherence. Arale's strength, which is infinite and applied with complete innocence about its effects, generates gags that depend on the gap between her perception of situations and the objective reality of what she is doing to the world around her. The visual execution — Toriyama's clean linework, his gift for comic timing expressed through panel composition, his ability to make the impossible look casually matter-of-fact — makes the jokes land as hard as any in the medium.

The relationship between gag manga and action manga is more complex than the genres' apparent opposition suggests. Toriyama moved from gag manga to "Dragon Ball," and the transition did not represent abandonment of his comedic sensibility but integration of it: Dragon Ball's early chapters are comedic, and even the later, more serious battle arcs retain a quality of lightness — Toriyama's instinct for visual absurdity, for the incongruous detail, for the character moment that punctures dramatic tension — that distinguishes them from the grimmer battle manga they influenced. The gag manga training is visible.

ONE's "One Punch Man" operates in this tradition explicitly. The series' premise — a hero so strong that every fight ends with a single punch, leaving him bored and existentially vacant — is a gag manga premise applied to action manga, and the joke is the entire structure of the series rather than an episode-level gag. The humor of watching the most powerful being in the world react with mild disappointment to situations that would devastate other heroes is gag manga logic — the gap between expectation and reality, between the scale of the situation and the flatness of the protagonist's response — applied at story level.

The gag manga tradition has produced artists of remarkable technical skill in visual comedy — the ability to construct a panel so that the joke lands precisely, to time a reveal across a page turn, to make an expression funny rather than merely indicating humor — that the more prestigious action and drama traditions have often imported without acknowledging the source. When a battle manga includes a comedic beat that actually works, the craft behind it usually traces to the gag manga tradition that trained the people who built the form.