Manga you could say is the Japanese equivalent of American Comics. In nutshell if you were going to explain this in one sentence to a person that was really dense, this would probably suffice. Then again there is a lot more at hand, than simply meets the eye. Manga you could say is at the root of the Anime / Manga genres. Most anime titles (almost all) are generated from some manga title. Much like anime, manga is not simply considered to something for kids. It isn't all that uncommon to see a regular business man in Japan on the subway reading manga. And of course with a diverse target audience like that, obviously the topic range will be diverse also.

Manga comes in a wide variety of forms, and topics. From the cute / romantic Ah! My Goddess, to the dark / violent Blade of the Immortal, there is a lot to choose from. In a manga you can see all the elements in life, and depth in the characters. If you were to take a look at American comics (whose comparison is inevitable I suppose), you can see pretty quickly that characters don't seem to have very much in the way of depth. Manga characters are multidimensional, and often change over time as they learn and experience. Even the villains have quite a bit of depth, with hopes and aspirations like their non-evil counterparts. Plots and tragedies play their part, and often a manga series tends to have a much tighter focus than most American equivalents. This is probably due to the fact that manga is more like an illustrated novel. Things progress in a definite direction, and usually have some sort of conclusion. Because a series has a goal, and the writer/artist usually has some sort of knowledge of how things turn out, it gives a manga series a much more powerful impact over the lifetime of the entire story. While an American comic tends to happen much like a sitcom "episode of the week", and tends to only run as long as commercially viable; a manga series evolves and plots can make changes in which the consequences are only seen much later on. This also creates a situation that confuses many people in America, in that a manga series may in fact end at the very height of it's popularity.

As for art styles, manga is like anime, but varies with the artist (which only makes sense). Manga is for the most part black and white. I have yet to see manga in color (and I'm not overly sure why this is), but this by no means detracts from the artwork. There is a huge array of different style; all of which are unique to that particular artist (or group of artists). Some styles in fact sort of follow a pattern. Girls comics (shock) for example, typically have rather "lanky" or "skinny" looking characters, and often have more delicate features then others outside the genre. In fact in many ways, the fact that manga is black and white can actually ENHANCE the artwork since artists cannot simply hide their work with color touch ups. More often than not, this also means that when a manga series crosses over to an anime format, much of the artistic style is lost. Often character designs are done around whatever the animation character flavor of the day happens to be, and a few of the manga attributes are simply inserted to make the series more unique. Unfortunately, with the total dependence on computers for animation, it seems that even more of these touches are lost. While it would be practically impossible for any sort of animation to occur based off of the total original manga design (within any attainable budget), computer shortcuts are rather ill equipped to handle the meticulous line elements of manga characters. If you need proof of this, simply look at Kamakaze Kaito Jenne. As far as the actual books go, manga in original Japanese form, has reverse page order (Japanese read from back to front) so if you see on an Americanized magna "this is a mirrored version of the original", it really is a mirror of the original.

Another thing to note about manga (original Japanese manga anyhow), is the fact that the Japanese use words which technically have no meaning, but are simply sounds. For example "pika pika" is something equivalent to twinkle twinkle, but is often used to refer to something bright. Another example would be "niko" which implies a smile. These often pop up in manga as effects like the gleam off of a sword. The purpose of the words themselves is rather hard to describe, although typically they are referred to as "sound words" such as the sound of a smile. In my opinion it enhances reading a bit (although can confuse the hell out of you if your new to reading Japanese).

As a final note I suppose I should mention the Japanese writing system. The Japanese write in 4 styles. The first is kanji which originated in China. Each kanji has a certain meaning (or represents one word you could say), and can be combined to make up different words. The second is hirogana, which is a written phonetic symbol. There are basically 46 hirogana. Each make a sound such as "te" or "sa". Normally Japanese writing is a mix of hirogana and kanji. The third type is katakana, which is similar to hirogana, except that katakana is used to spell foreign words such as koohii (coffee). The forth is romanji which is simply western alphabet letters like you are reading right now (which unlike Chinese is rather easily adapted to english characters). Japanese characters such as Kanji can have a much more artistic style than romanised text, and are in fact probably much better suited for writing in manga / comic books. As Japanese can be written ether left to right, or top to bottom, there is a lot of versatility in where text boxes may be placed. Kanji, more often than not; are very compact compared to an equivalent sentence in romanised characters. One shortcoming of using kanji is the fact that the character may not be recognized by everyone. Just in order to navigate the very basics in Japan, a person should know at the very least, a few hundred Kanji. In order to be considered literate, a person must know well over a thousand. This can be a problem for many manga as the target audience can often be in junior high school (or younger), and as Japanese youth cannot understand the kanji, they cannot understand the overall meaning of many sentences. This is often overcome by placing the phonetic equivalent in hirogana beside the kanji (in an extremely small font). In this respect you could actually say that Japanese comics are in fact educational to some extent as they can teach younger readers new kanji. Sometimes however this method is also found in more adult manga; typically when either the audience is probably not well educated (ie. smut) or the Kanji is unusual and probably not so widely known. It is not uncommon for a Japanese person not to know the pronunciation of a person or name place, as the pronunciation of a kanji can often change depending upon the word it is a part of.

Traditional Japanese books are read opposite of English texts; That is, you start a book from the "back cover" and read towards the "front cover" (right to left). Likewise each picture cell flows from right to left and top to bottom. This often meant that pictures would have to be mirrored during translations. One tricky aspect is that Japanese is usually written vertically, which leads "word bubbles" to also be oriented vertically. Trying to stuff horizontal English texts in such bubbles can be a challenge. Although some comics are mirrored, some more recent translators are leaving the origonal artwork in tact and require that you read the english version from back to front as well.

To learn more about manga, see the about anime section. There is a tight bond between anime and manga, and I discuss more things which also apply to manga there.

Manga Samples

Read Left to Right Oh My Goddess

Read Right to Left Tsukihime Complex

Read Right to Left GTO

Read Right to Left GTO