Manga

Manga is the Japanese word for comics; outside of Japan, it usually refers specifically to Japanese comics. Mangaka is the corresponding Japanese word for a manga artist. Because most Japanese nouns have no plural form, manga can be used to refer to multiple comics, although mangas is used sometimes in English.

Origins
Literally translated, manga means "random pictures." The word first came into common usage after the publication of the 19th century Hokusai Manga, containing assorted drawings from the sketchbook of the famous ukiyo-e artist Hokusai. However, gi-ga (lit. "funny pictures") drawn in the 12th century by various artists contain many manga-like qualities such as emphasis on story and simple, artistic lines.

In the 20th century, manga came to refer to comics. Though roughly equivalent to the American comic book, manga hold more importance in Japanese culture than comics do in American culture. Manga is well respected both as an art form and as a form of popular literature. Like its American counterpart, manga has been criticized for being violent and sexual; however, there have been no official inquiries or laws that have tried to limit what can be drawn in manga, except for fuzzy decency laws that apply to all published materials, stating that "overly indecent materials should not be sold." This freedom has allowed artists to draw manga for every age group and about every topic.

Manga format
Manga magazines usually have many series running concurrently with approximately 30-40 pages allocated to each series per issue. These manga magazines, or "anthology magazines", as they are also known, can be anywhere from 200 to more than 850 pages long. Manga magazines also contain one-shot comics and various four-panel manga (equivalent to comic strips). Manga series can run for many years if they are successful.

When a series has been running for a while, the stories are collected together and printed in dedicated book-sized volumes. These volumes use higher-quality paper, and are useful to those who want to "catch up" with a series so they can follow it in the magazines or if they find the cost of the weeklies or monthlies to be prohibitive. Recently, "deluxe" versions have also been printed as readers have gotten older and the need for something special grew. Old manga had also been reprinted using somewhat lesser quality papers and sold for 100 yen each to counter the effect book recycling had on publishers.

Since kanji (Japanese ideograms) are taught in pre-college schools according to a fixed government-prescribed sequence, most manga magazines specify on their cover the school year corresponding to the kanji used in the text. Children manga, and sometimes even adult manga, often have furigana (pronunciation) next to some kanji in the text. The furigana use the hiragana and katakana syllabaries, which are learned very early in grammar school, and thus can be understood by anyone. (There are even special furigana Japanese-English dictionaries.) Furigana is also often used for character names, since these often use unusual kanji that may have more than one possible reading.

Manga which are specifically intended for boys or for girls are named shonen and shoujo, respectively.

The manga style
The most popular and recognizable style of manga is very distinctive. Emphasis is often placed on line over form, and the storytelling and panel placement differ from those in Western comics. Panels and pages are typically read from right to left, consistent with traditional Japanese writing. While the art can be incredibly realistic or cartoonish, it is often noted that the characters look "Western", or have large eyes. Large eyes have become a permanent fixation in manga and anime since the 1960s when Osamu Tezuka, creator of Astro Boy and considered the father of modern manga, started drawing them that way, mimicking the style of Disney cartoons from America. Being a very diverse artform, however, not all manga artists adhere to the conventions most popularized in the west through anime such as Akira, Sailor Moon, Dragonball Z and Ranma 1/2.

Fairly surprising for western readers is that (somewhat like the Jazz approach to melody) manga artists don't feel that their stories and characters are set in stone. So a set of characters may build relationships, jobs, etc. in one set of stories ("story arc") only to have another story arc run where the same characters do not know each other. The Tenchi series in particular is known for this; there are more than thirteen different pretty-much unrelated story arcs based around Tenchi and his friends.

Off the main path
Some manga artists will produce extra, sometimes unrelated material, which are known as omake (lit. "bonus" or "extra"). They might also publish their unfinished drawings or sketches, known as oekaki (lit. "sketches").

Unofficial fan made comics are called doujinshi. Some doujinshi continue with a series' story or write an entirely new one using its characters, much like fan fiction. In addition other doujinshi is produced by small amateur publishers outside of the mainstream commercial market in a similar fashion to small-press independantly published comic books in the United States. The largest comic book convention in the world Comiket is devoted to doujinshi.