Task: Question Answering
Input (English): Context: VIZ Media LLC is a Japanese-American manga, anime, and entertainment company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It was founded in 1986 as VIZ LLC. In 2005, VIZ LLC and ShoPro Entertainment merged to form the current VIZ Media LLC, which is jointly owned by Japanese publishers Shueisha, Shogakukan, and Shogakukan-Shueisha Productions (ShoPro)., The manga was originally serialized by Shogakukan on its magazine "Big Comic Spirits" from 1986 to 1998. It was first published in North America by Viz Media in comic book form. Viz later republished the series in graphic novel form in two versions: an initial set and longer volumes that combined the initial volumes together, dubbed "Perfect Collections." From 2006 to 2007, the manga was republished by Dark Horse Comics in five volumes., The history of comics has followed different paths in different cultures. Scholars have posited a pre-history as far back as the Lascaux cave paintings. By the mid-20th century, comics flourished particularly in the United States, western Europe (especially in France and Belgium), and Japan. The history of European comics is often traced to Rodolphe Töpffer's cartoon strips of the 1830s, and became popular following the success in the 1930s of strips and books such as "The Adventures of Tintin". American comics emerged as a mass medium in the early 20th century with the advent of newspaper comic strips; magazine-style comic books followed in the 1930s, in which the superhero genre became prominent after Superman appeared in 1938. Histories of Japanese comics and cartooning ("") propose origins as early as the 12th century. Modern comic strips emerged in Japan in the early 20th century, and the output of comics magazines and books rapidly expanded in the post-World War II era with the popularity of cartoonists such as Osamu Tezuka. had a lowbrow reputation for much of its history, but towards the end of the 20th century began to find greater acceptance with the public and in academia., In contrast to the hiragana syllabary, which is used for those Japanese language words and grammatical inflections which kanji does not cover, the katakana syllabary usage is quite similar to italics in English; specifically, it is used for transcription of foreign language words into Japanese and the writing of loan words (collectively "gairaigo"); for emphasis; to represent onomatopoeia; for technical and scientific terms; and for names of plants, animals, minerals, and often Japanese companies., The term "manga" (kanji: ; hiragana: ; katakana:  or ) in Japan is a word used to refer to both comics and cartooning. "Manga" as a term used outside Japan refers to comics originally published in Japan., Kanji, or "kan'ji", are the adopted logographic Chinese characters (') that are used in the modern Japanese writing system along with hiragana and katakana. The Japanese term "kanji" for the Chinese characters literally means "Han characters" and is written using the same characters as the Chinese word '., Hiragana and katakana are both kana systems. With one or two minor exceptions, each sound in the Japanese language (strictly, each mora) is represented by one character (or one digraph) in each system. This may be either a vowel such as ""a"" (hiragana ); a consonant followed by a vowel such as ""ka"" (); or ""n"" (), a nasal sonorant which, depending on the context, sounds either like English "m", "n", or "ng", or like the nasal vowels of French. Because the characters of the kana do not represent single consonants (except in the case of  "n"), the kana are referred to as syllabaries and not alphabets., Ryoichi Ikegami (   Ikegami Ryichi , born 29 May 1944 ) is a manga artist . He was assistant to manga artist Shigeru Mizuki in 1966 . In 2001 , he won the Shogakukan Manga Award for general manga as the artist of Heat . He became a professor at Osaka University of Arts in 2005 . Ikegami has worked on several popular series , such as Mai , the Psychic Girl with writer Kazuya Kudo , Crying Freeman , with writer Kazuo Koike , as well as Sanctuary and Heat with writer Sho Fumimura . He also wrote and drew Spider - Man : The Manga , a manga version of Spider - Man and collaborated with Garon Tsuchiya for the manga BOX ( BOX  ) . His most recent work is Lord currently serialized in Big Comic Superior ., Subject: ryoichi ikegami, Relation: languages_spoken_or_written, Options: (A) chinese (B) english (C) japanese
Output (English): japanese