Can We Call Manga “Comics”?

With the current discourse about manga outshining comics, one has to ask…aren’t manga  “comics”?

“Manga” essentially translates to “motionless pictures” last I heard. In other words, comics. It’s not used to describe storyboards. I think. It’s comics from Japan. My comic-making program used to be called Manga Studio, but called Comic Studio in Japan. (Once animation was added they changed it to Clip Studio.) The use of “manga” for “Japanese comics” by the same people who can’t translate the Japanese word for “plan” has come to grow on my nerves. The same for “anime” and car…well, that’s a whole other discussion since it involves Western animation fans who throw a fit if you call Don Bluth’s work a “cartoon”, so we’ll open that kettle of fish some other time. The same for “comic” and “graphic novel”. Some people “need to get over themselves. Also, “Trekkers” is the people who worked on the show and “Trekees” is only a bad term if your boring and want to be “sophisticated” to a group who looks down on science fiction. You don’t see the “Whovians” complaining! Okay, now I’m going off topic. Or just off.

I use “manga” on this site because it has become part of the discussion, and thus I kind of have to. However, it’s grown to having French and Korean comics referred to as the French and Korean word for “comics”, a shorthand that only works if you know what “manwah” means. I’m only going by context. The only Korean I ever learned is “Opa Gangnam Style” and I’m not even sure that’s right and only have a mild understanding of what it means. (Referring to the Korean answer to Beverly Hills, I think.) The video I’m building this article from is by a fan of AMERICAN comics though, deciding that manga shouldn’t be called comics, or at least explaining why he doesn’t. He makes the case that they are in fact so different that in his mind it’s wrong to refer to them as comics. I don’t think his perspective is wrong necessarily, but I will go over why I don’t agree with it.

Catch more from Foxhole Comics on YouTube

I agree with him enough that this isn’t a “versus” article. For example, it’s not as “cut and dry” a debate. I did try to find a video with the opposite opinion, to turn this into more of a “great (x) debate” post, but I didn’t have any luck. Most videos wanted instead to look at whether or not “comics” were dying with the rise of “manga”. That’s not what we’re discussing. At the same time, defenders of “comic” sales use manga sales numbers to push the idea that “comics are fine, there’s nothing to worry about, you’re too negative”. Except the people pointing out comic sales are down are referring to US comics. The periodicals, the monthly “floppies”, have very low sales figures because since they’re writing for the trades, people wait for the trades. Since everything is a multi-part storyline with the fate of everything hanging in the balance, they remind me of a fireworks display I went to once that went on so long I wanted it to be over. I love fireworks displays!

Even manga are hitting a decline right now. The economy is making it harder to buy anything at this time, while some of the biggest manga series just ended. Akira Toriyama passed away, as did Yu-Gi-Oh creator Kazuki Takahashi. One-Piece and My Hero Academia are reaching or have completed their final story arcs. Manga stories usually end after a while, though some get sequels like Naruto‘s spinoff about the title character’s son. Comics By Perch recently did a video about it. While there are still some popular series going, having so many end like a YouTuber moving to other projects means a decline until the next big things take their place. Maybe it’s time to bring back Oh My Goddess!

Oh My Goddess, aka Ah! My Goddess, Japanese manga published in the US layout and size.

I use that one specifically to bring up one interesting note that the host is probably too young to know about, and where my experience differs from his, despite growing up with US comics and superheroes like he did: I was introduced to Japanese comics in a comic store, in my late teens and early twenties. (Yes, I’m old!) Dark Horse and Viz used to publish comics with the art flipped to match the American style, and in the traditional American size format. There would be trades in digest form, like US comics do now in graphic novel size or the various Archie titles used to do and sold at K-Mart, and some comics (Bio-Booster Armor Guyver) worked better than others (Dragonball) in the US format. I even picked up manga and manga-inspired titles that are rather obscure like Metal Guardian Faust and Dodekain, the former being a manga I would love to see finished because I got into it. They also slowly introduced an alternate version going from right to left like they do in Japan as fans started getting a look at the original and demanded “the art must be preserved”, and now I don’t think anybody flips the art anymore for Western comic fans not used to the Japanese style. All US-published manga I’m aware of goes right to left.

Thus my introduction to Japanese comics is the same as my introduction to Japanese animation. As a kid I didn’t know or care that Battle Of The Planets, Voltron, Robotech, and Tranzor Z were not produced in America or for an American audience like Mighty Orbots, Transformers, or Challenge Of The GoBots, or that the toys from those last two came from reimagining existing Japanese toylines. They were just TV shows I grew up with, enjoyed, and still enjoy when I go back to watch them. Even Toonami, the Cartoon Network programming block praised for introducing anime to many current Western fans, started out showing non-anime action shows. Toonami was the action block, with shows like Space Ghost and Jonny Quest. Slowly, anime was introduced with Robotech, Voltron, Ronin Warriors, and Sailor Moon starting a new trend of Japanese animation, and all of them first came out in first-run syndication. Then they put out the “Midnight Run” edition for more violent shows, but still less violent (due to FCC rules) than some of the stuff that came out during the 1980s “Japanimation” boom, a cheap way to take advantage of the new home video market without taking time to care about quality of the dub. “They’ll be fine with the gore and tits, plus we’ll have them swear a lot to really show how mature it is.” Then the video store put it with G.I. Joe and Care Bears. The warning is there for a reason, you moron!

Let’s also not forget that comic strips also used to be collected…as what he calls comics. That’s actually how comic books started, with original stories coming later. Now comic strips are collected in a format that better shows them off in the proper aspect ratio, When did they stop being comics? I don’t mind using a term to describe the format, though just using the language of the foreign country to describe them has led to other discussions as to what qualifies as “anime”. Some people want to treat Avatar: The Last Airbender as anime, and that’s a whole other conversation. As I said in the article intro, it was Japanese media fans in the West who insisted Japanese comics be called “anime” as part of some quasi-elitist middle finger to Western comics, an “our stuff is better” mentality that continues to cause a divide, despite how many US comics like much of Antarctic Press and Udon Studios owe to Japanese and Korean art and story styles.

Artists rendition of what Archie Comics did to the original style that lasted generations, but not this one!

Then again, US comics have never been just superheroes. Sci-fi, horror (which had to survive the Comics Code to make a comeback), funny kids stories, adaptations of everything from Star Trek to the Looney Tunes, slice-of-life comedies like Archie and the gang before it got “Riverdaled” by trying to match the CW desecration of America’s Favorite Teenager (thankfully without Archie sleeping with Ms. Grundy–yuk!), are all things that have been coming out for years. It’s just DC and Marvel abandoned that stuff, altered the horror and romance comics to merge into their regular comic universes (Night Nurse used to just be an ER nurse on the night shift) and because they’re considered the “Big Two” even before being owned by major conglomerates, they became the face of comics.

So back to the question at hand: are manga “comics”? I give the same response I give about “anime”. I don’t care. The division was caused by media snobs who preferred the Japanese style and wanted to distance themselves from what “comics” was doing. Comics, minicomics, graphic novels, manga, manwah–it’s all just unnecessary or misused divisions rather than describing a particular style or format. Even British comics do things differently from the US, but nobody to my knowledge gives them a different descriptor outside of comics. I think. Maybe they do. It’s just more division, and it gets silly when they try to call a US comic “manga” rather than “Japanese style” because it took a lot from how Japan does things. Don’t forget, Japan took much of their style from the US, particularly Osamu Tezuka being inspired by Walt Disney, much as the late Lou Scheimer was inspired by Alex Raymond and George Lucas by the serials based on the work of Alex Raymond. Even Batman, partly inspired by Zorro to a lesser extent than The Shadow, has reverse influenced later depictions of “the fox”. Filmation even gave him his own Robin for the only Filmation series made…in Japan!

To me it’s all comics, just with different styles and influences…plus what we thing of as manga style isn’t completely accurate as there are manga that use art styles other than the wide-eyed cartoony looking characters that usually dominate what we get in the West. So forget the labels. What are you reading? Tell them the title. Granted, Japanese titles translate into full sentences in English, but that’s a recent translation trend, too.