Smoking repeatedly appears in the media including television,¹ films,^2,3 advertisements,⁴ and books,⁵ and may encourage early initiation of smoking by adolescents.^6,7 Comics are another medium with influence over children and adolescents in many Asian countries. Most comics are imported from Japan where comic magazines sell several million copies every week. Popular titles become TV animation series or theatrical animated films. We examined depiction of smoking in popular comic magazines.

We selected the top four selling magazines according to monthly circulations from each of four categories (girls’, women’s, boys’, and youths’ magazines); data on sales and categorisation were derived from Japan’s periodicals in print.⁸ Magazines for primary to high school students were categorised as boys’ and girls’; those for young adults as youths’ and women’s. We selected four …