In the late 1950s some Japanese cartoonists started calling their work gekiga, "dramatic pictures", to set it apart from the cartoony manga of the day. Both are black and white. The difference is the grit.
Two friends at a bus stop
A lighthouse at dusk
gritty black-and-white brushwork
Gritty, realistic brushwork, heavy blacks and grey ink wash, and weathered grown-up faces. Light is hard, shadows are deep, and nobody is drawn cute.
Samurai tales, crime and hard-bitten adult drama, where the story is about what things cost.
Where it comes from: Japanese dramatic comics, 1957–1970s.
black-and-white manga, speed lines
A cleaner pen line that swells at impact, mechanical grey dots instead of wash, speed lines, and big expressive faces built to read fast.
Action serials and rivalries with energy to spare: the register most people mean by "manga style".
Where it comes from: Weekly shonen magazines, 1980s–2000s.
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Both are black-and-white looks, so on both the caption box turns white with black ink. In Gekiga's heavy blacks the box stands out like a lit window; on Shonen Ink's brighter pages it sits quietly.
Either way, the studio letters each caption where the picture has room, and every panel of every issue keeps the look you start with.
