漫画manga
Quick definition:Manga is the Japanese word for comics and graphic novels, usually printed in black and white and read from right to left, covering stories for every age group and many genres.
Meaning
Manga means comics in Japanese, and the word is used for Japanese comics and for works made in that style elsewhere. Pages are normally printed in black and white, and books are read from the back cover to the front, with panels and speech bubbles flowing from right to left. Stories can run for a few chapters or for decades.
Chapters are first published in magazines, which collect many series in one thick weekly or monthly issue. Popular chapters are then gathered into paperback volumes called tankobon. Manga are aimed at different readerships, and the main categories are shonen, shojo, seinen and josei, which are named after the age and gender of the intended audience. Many successful series later become anime.
Manga is an important part of publishing in Japan, and translated volumes now sell well in many other countries. Readers who follow a series weekly get a close, serial feel, with cliffhangers placed at the end of each chapter.
Origin:Manga is written with two kanji, man, meaning whimsical or casual, and ga, meaning pictures, so it is often explained as whimsical pictures. The word was used in Japan by the early nineteenth century, when the artist Hokusai put it in the title of his sketchbooks. Modern manga took shape in the decades after the Second World War.
Example:Dragon Ball shows the usual route of a hit series: weekly chapters in a magazine, later collected into volumes, then adapted into an anime. Its young hero, Goku, trains in martial arts and travels the world, and each chapter ends at a moment of tension that brings readers back.
Did you know?Many weekly manga are produced to a strict deadline of a fixed number of pages every week, so artists commonly rely on assistants for backgrounds and finishing touches. A single chapter can take a team several days of intense work to complete.
