What does 劇画 Gekiga mean?

Gekiga means dramatic pictures. Associated with Yoshihiro Tatsumi, it describes an approach to comics whose emphasis on drama and realism cannot be reduced to an age label.

The name makes an argument

劇画 is read gekiga: 劇 contributes drama, and 画 contributes pictures. Daijisen's entry credits Tatsumi with naming his work this way and describes realistic treatment of backgrounds and perspective, with narrative interest and plausibility at the center. This is vocabulary for an artistic practice, not rude speech or a warning label.

What Tatsumi wanted to change

A Japan Foundation interview in Japanese Book News 68, page 16, connects Tatsumi's approach to cinema and to lives on society's margins. The interview also records his Gekiga Workshop in 1959. There are named artists, experiments and publishing circumstances behind the term; it did not appear merely because comics began depicting adults.

That interview describes another complication: the name later became associated with graphic sex, crime and violence. Those associations are part of the term's history. They do not exhaust Tatsumi's stated interest in immediate social problems or the visual methods discussed in the interview.

An approach is not a readership

Seinen and gekiga answer different classification questions. The former concerns readership; the latter carries an argument about the kind of comics being made. Treating them as synonyms would make the history of the latter disappear.

Violence alone also supplies weak evidence. A fight can be drawn in many ways. A useful discussion of gekiga asks how a work organizes action, renders its surroundings and gives dramatic weight to its subjects, then relates those observations to the named practice. It does not classify every dark-looking page from a single visual feature.