« Between 1967 and 1969, the steady stream of new women artists turned to a flood, and attention soon focused on a vaguely defined group of young artists who came to be known as the "Fabulous Forty-Niners," because many of them were born in or around 1949. Artists such as Moto Hagio (creator of They Were Eleven and A, A'), Yumiko Oh-shima (creator of Banana Bread Pudding), Keiko Takemiya (creator of Toward the Terra), Riyoko Ikeda (creator of The Rose of Versailles), and Ryohko Yamagishi (creator of The Son of Heaven in the Land Where the Sun Rises) began to experiment with new themes, stories and styles, rejecting the limitations of traditional definitions of the shôjo manga genre and appealing to increasingly older readers. They played with notions of gender and sexuality, adapted such "boys' genres" as science fiction, and explored some of the weightiest issues of human existence. » — Matt Thorn, « A History of Manga », Animerica: Anime & Manga Monthly, vol. 4, nos 2,4, & 6, (lire en ligne, consulté le )
