Doraemon

Doraemon (ドラえもん, Doraemon?) is a Japanese manga series created by Fujiko F. Fujio (the pen name of Hiroshi Fujimoto) which later became an anime series and Asian franchise. The series is about a robotic cat named Doraemon, who travels back in time from the 22nd century to aid a schoolboy, Nobita Nobi.

The series first appeared in December 1969, when it was published simultaneously in six different magazines. In total, 1,344 stories were created in the original series, which are published by Shogakukan under the Tentōmushi (てんとう虫, Tentōmushi?) manga brand, extending to forty-five volumes. The volumes are collected in the Takaoka Central Library in Toyama, Japan, where Fujio was born.

Doraemon was awarded the first Shogakukan Manga Award for children's manga in 1982, and the first Osamu Tezuka Culture Award in 1997.

In Vietnam, Doraemon has become the series with largest amount of publishing to date (totally 40 million) and is continually printed and released[1].

History

In December 1969, the Doraemon manga appeared simultaneously in six different children's monthly magazines. The magazines were titled by the year of children's studies, which included Yoiko (good children), Yōchien (nursery school), and Shogaku Ichinensei (first grade) to Shogaku Yonnensei (fourth grade). By 1973, the series began to appear in two more magazines, Shogaku Gonensei (fifth grade) and Shogaku Rokunensei (sixth grade). The stories featured in each of the magazines were different, meaning the author was originally creating more than six stories each month. In 1977, CoroCoro Comic was launched as a magazine of Doraemon. Original manga based on the Doraemon movies were also released in CoroCoro Comic. The stories which are preserved under the Tentōmushi brand are the stories found in these magazines.

Since the debut of Doraemon in 1969, the stories have been selectively collected into forty-five books published from 1974 to 1996, which had a circulation of over 80 million in 1992. In addition, Doraemon has appeared in a variety of manga series by Shōgakukan. In 2005, Shōgakukan published a series of five more manga volumes under the title Doraemon+ (Doraemon Plus), which were not found in the forty-five Tentōmushi volumes.