Digimon

Digimon (デジモン Dejimon?), short for (デジタルモンスターDejitaru Monsutā?, "Digital Monster") is a popular Japanese series of media and merchandise created by Akiyoshi Hongo, which is comprised of anime, manga, toys, video games, trading card games and other media. Digimon, the lifeforms the series revolves around, are monsters of various forms living in a "Digital World," a parallel universe that originated from Earth's various communication networks.

On March 6, 1999, the franchise was given an anime as the first of the Digimon movies aired in theaters in Japan. On March 7th, 1999, they began airing a television counterpart titled Digimon Adventure. 6 further series would follow, but so far not all of them have their own tie-in movies, and the series was dubbed for release in western markets in the fall of the same year. The show spawned card games, with Hyper Colosseum in Japan and later Digi-Battle in America, and more video games. The animated series is easily the best-known segment of the Digimon universe and responsible for the majority of its popularity.

Digimon first appeared in narrative form in the one-shot manga "C'mon Digimon", released in the summer of 1997. C'mon Digimon spawned the popular Digimon Adventure V-Tamer 01 manga, written by Hiroshi Izawa,which began serialization on November 21, 1998. None of the Japanese manga have been localized into English, although the Korean manhhua have.