>>4477
Mitsui Jun single-handedly created the modern shota, too. Not a lot of people know that "shotacon" existed in the 90's, but it was just a subset of the typical yaoi of the time. Preteen boys that were basically super feminine shy lithe traps, being penetrated by brooding adult semes, and the plot was always super-serious, the sex implied more than shown. Heavily censored, dicks as "cones of light" and the such. The fact that they were boys, and not lolis, really made little difference. The idea of a work that was boy/boy was unknown because as the "passive" partner, the female analogue, the shota was incapable of ever penetrating anyone.
But MJ suddenly introduced an entirely different type, producing fun sexual comics with boyish shotas fucking each other. Sometimes adults were involved, but more often than not the boy was still the "dominant" partner. This kind of paralleled the shift in the shounen protagonist from a Kenshin type to a Goku type. The popularity also happened to coincide with the rise of the "scanlation", as the spread of internet resources and accessibility of scanning/image-editing software made it possible for the first time for translators and editors to collaborate online to spread it to a wider (English speaking) audience.
The really hilarious part is that the first translation is always the one that stuck. Seems nobody is interested in going back for a second pass to clean up the translation/editing, or find a higher-quality scan, even decades later. Hell, myself and a friend (she was taking Japanese in college) actually did a couple for funsies back in the mid 2000's, and these somehow got spread across the internet and nobody has ever made a better one.